devops for the sysadmin

© 2010 VMware Inc. All rights reserved

DevOps for the SysAdmin

Byron Schaller, Senior Automation Architect, VMware

Rob Nelson, Network Security Engineer, AT&T

What DevOps Is Not:

Devops Is Not:

▪A Department

▪A Title

▪A Certification

▪A Set of Tools

▪A Club

▪Only For Startups

▪Only For Developers

▪Only For Companies That

Write Code

▪ Only For The Enterprise

▪ Only For Linux Shops

What DevOps Is:

DevOps is “a cross-disciplinary community

of practice dedicated to the study of

building, evolving and operating rapidly-

changing resilient systems at scale.”-Jez Humble

“DevOps is the practice of operations and

development engineers participating

together in the entire service lifecycle, from

design through the development

process to production support.”-The Agile Admin

The Three Ways

SysAdmin Feng Shui

▪ Frequent Open Communication

• Increased Value due to visibility into your effort.

▪ Stop The Line

• Never Pass a Defect Downstream

• The End User gets what they need, when and how they need it.

▪ Include Everyone From The Beginning

• This leads to less unplanned work and rushed changes

▪ Identify Bottlenecks

• All efforts at improving the system should be focused on the constraint

• An improvement anywhere else is an illusion

Sharing is Caring

▪ Eliminate Tribal Knowledge

• Document and Manage your system configurations

• Actively share knowledge between working groups – in both directions!

• Find your network, storage, security folks, hug them and ask questions

▪ Engage with your customers

• Do this all the time

• Encourage open and honest communication

• When things break, encourage them to let you know, loudly

▪ Doing painful things often makes them less painful

• It’s just constructive criticism

• This will encourage trust and openness

• Outages and defects will be resolved faster

• Less unplanned work means more time for fun projects

Fail Fast, Fail Often

▪ Failure IS an Option

• Promote learning by fostering a blameless culture

• This does not mean to tolerate incompetence

• Learn from every failure and share the knowledge

• Cause predictable failures and learn from them

• Aggressively test disaster plans by causing actual disasters.

▪ Apply Constant Pressure

• Always seek to decrease cycle time

• Incremental changes daily trump forklift upgrades quarterly (or worse!)

• You can always do better

▪ Stick To It

• You get better at it with repetition

• Good things take time

• Requires management buy-in to stick it out

The Enemies of Devops

Work In Progress and Unplanned Work

Work in Progress needs to flow.

Pushing Work upstream into a queue causes more negative impact than waiting.

WIP accumulates at the input of your bottleneck

Fix the bottleneck.

Focus all efforts available to fix the bottleneck.

Unplanned work kills productivity and creativity.

Wakes you up at 3AM.

Is completely avoidable.

Technical Dept

Anytime you take a purposeful shortcut, cut corners, or released with bugs due to time frame, you earn

technical debt.

Technical debt, like real debt accumulates over time.

Everyday you have a choice to pay off the technical debt to fix the issue, or ignore it for the good of

new features.

Time to market will always trump paying off technical debt.

The debt gets worse and more complicated over time and ends in an unsustainable system.

Tools and Next Steps

Tools to Help You on Your Path

▪ Config Management

Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible

▪ Version Control

Git, Github, Mercurial, BitBucket

▪ Communication

Skype, Slack, FlowDoc, IRC

▪ Task Management

Asana, Kanban, Trello

Reading List

Required Reading:The Phoenix Project - Gene Kim and others

The Goal - Dr. Eli Goldratt

Recommended Reading:Continuous Delivery - Jez Humble

Continuous Integration - Andrew Glover af others

Building Microservices - Sam Newman

The Visible Ops Handbook - Kevin Behr and Gene Kim

Contact Information

▪ Byron Schaller

▪ @byronschaller

▪ http://vbyron.com

▪ byron.schaller@gmail.com

▪ Rob Nelson

▪ @rnelson0

▪ http://rnelson0.com

▪ rnelson0@gmail.com