Configuration Management Isn’t Everything

Julian DunnSenior Consultant, Chef Software, Inc.jdunn@getchef.com

What Cred Do I Have?• 15 years experience in IT

• Consulting Engineer at Chef

• “Consultants are called when things are really screwed up”

As if.

Revolutionizing IT in a company takes a lot more than just usingconfiguration management.

How Configuration Management Projects Get Started

Executives: Speed is New Currency

Executives / Managers• “It takes forever to do anything around here”

• “Our site/apps are down too often”

• “Why can’t we be like Amazon.com?”

• “I have an iPad with all these apps”

System Administrators / Engineers• Configuration drift leading to failures/outages

• Handcrafted systems with unknown state

• Janky & error-prone one-off scripts

• Developers spend too much time “setting up environment”

• Constant firefighting and reactivity

Commonalities• Frustration with speed of IT

• Frustration with bureaucracy

• Poor working conditions for staff

• Along comes automation...

The Real End Goal• IT velocity

• IT as a core competency

• Successful companies will be IT companies

When Do CM Projects Fail?When Do They Succeed?

Failure: Unrealistic Expectations• Timelines

• Effort

• Scope of change

• “Magic”

“They see the demo, don't understand what was done, and think it shits miracles.”

Success: Correct Expectations• Investment

• People

• Code

• Time

• Open to changing almost anything

Fail: Not dedicating resources• “DevOps Team”

• Reliance on consultants

• Reliance on contractors

• Not their “real job”

Success: Own the CM• Engineers with domain expertise writing code

• Part of their “real job”

• Own the changes

“Why do we do things this way?”

Success: Candid Process Assessment• Value-stream mapping

• Origins of ITIL & safety gates

• Loosen controls in proportion to consistency guarantees

Fail: Big Bang Approach• Hardest problem

• Biggest problem

• All at once

• Pick a small project

• Make change incrementally

• Choose a route that will minimize likelihood of failure

Success: Incremental Change

Fail: Lack of Advance Planning• You can’t automate what you don’t understand

• What do you even have?

Success: Advance Planning• Spend time up front building the model

• Writing CM code on day 1 is ineffective

• Workflow is as important as the work

Fail: Doing It By Force• Arbitrary deadlines with no business reason

• Panic

• “Failure is not an option”

Failure is always an option.

“When bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them. We never panicked, and we never gave up on finding a solution.”

- Gene Krantz

Toolbox for Successful CM

All that said...• Certain tools are complementary with CM

• Primary: Tools that improve team communication, collaboration and experimentation

• Secondary: Tools that complement CM’s consistency guarantees

Source Control• Why is Git so popular?

• Easy experimentation

• Full control offline

• Collaboration & communication

• Use whatever source control system lets you have these features

Artifact Consistency• Artifact server

• Consistency

• Reproducibility

• Immutability

• Complementary to CM system

Control Flow of Vendor Patches• “Artifact server” for patches

coming from upstream vendor

• RedHat Satellite

• Spacewalk/Katello

• WSUS

• Ubuntu Landscape

• others?

Wrap-Up

The Three P’s• People

• Process

• Product

People• Own the skills

• Develop internal resources

• Jez Humble: “Stop Hiring ‘Devops Experts’ And Start Growing Them”

Process• Using a CM tool to capture bad process doesn’t get you very far

• Understand current value-stream map

Product• CM system is the “star”

• “Supporting cast”

Thank You!• Jez Humble: http://www.slideshare.net/jezhumble/stop-hiring-devops-experts-and-start-growing-them

• Mark Imbriaco, ChatOps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCVvYCjvoZI