From DevOps to Operations Science

Christopher Brown, CTO, Opscode

• Christopher Brown• Chief Technology Officer• Twitter: @skeptomai, Email: cb@opscode.com

From DevOps to Operations ScienceA business transformation in 3 acts…

3

http://dlutzy.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/velocity-2011-day-1/

CTO

What is Chef?

Recipes and Cookbooks that describe and deliver code.

Chef enables people to easily build & manage complex & dynamic applications at massive scale.

• Model for describing infrastructure that promotes reuse

• Programmatically provision and configure

• Reconstruct business from code repository, data backup, and bare metal resources

Chef is an IT automation platform for developers & systems engineers to continuously define, build, and manage infrastructure.

CHEF USES:

“”

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People

Business

Technology

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People

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Software EngineeringSystems Adminstrators

“Business” People?DevOps

Hey Ops! Do I have to fire you?

...the site’s down again

“I was hired to roll back code”

DevOps is supposed to fix this, right?

That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-american-health-care-killed-my-father/307617/

“Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results.

Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention.

That disguise true costs.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/baerchen57/5609858075/sizes/l/in/pool-809956@N25/

Developer Duck

Ops Beaver

http://www.biokids.umich.edu/critters/1995/Castor_canadensis/pictures/

http://www.amamoorlodge.com.au/images/platypus-03-swimming.jpg

DevOps Platypus

“The demographic seems to be experienced, talented 30-something sysadmin coders with a clear understanding that writing software is about making money and shipping product.”

“If you're a developer, go and make friends with your sysadmins. Don't view them as lower life forms, or as people to lob problems to. ... If they're using Puppet or Chef, get involved - start contributing to their codebase.”

How does DevOps help?

http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing-anyway/

- Patrick Debois

Business

“In ten years, I’m certain every COO worth their salt will have come from IT. Any COO who doesn’t

intimately understand the IT systems that actually run the business is just an empty suit, relying on someone else to do their job.”

Kim, Gene; Behr, Kevin ; Spafford, George (2013-01-10). The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win (Kindle Locations 5805-5807). IT Revolution Press. Kindle Edition.

The Back Office Becomes The Front Office

• IT was historically a source of internal efficiency

• As more and more customers prefer digital consumption, that role shifts to one that is increasingly customer centric – the front of the business, not the back– Every technology that

previously impacted only internal business functions now directly supports customer interactions!

Software is the interface for consumption

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebatty/467581939/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Applications became customer service vehicles

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” – Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com)

“The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.” – Sam Walton (Walmart)

• Is the cultural and professional movement that grew directly from the collective experience of the pioneers of this transition

• It’s application to traditional IT is 1:1• The business adaptations encapsulated in

Devops will eventually be ubiquitous– ....At least, if you want to be great at the next couple decades of global economic growth

DevOps

• Businesses must deliver better customer experience as quickly and safely as possible.

• Safety matters! • Failure to do so will have

serious impacts on customer satisfaction and loyalty – just like it did when Sam Walton was the Ghengis Kahn of rural retail.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/huffstutterrobertl/5088855119/lightbox/

Continuous Delivery

Every success story we’ve found shares some common traits

Every failure lacks one or more of them

• Focus on responsibility and accountability, rather than authority

– Functional teams have responsibility for design, implementation, and administration of their products and services – cradle to grave.

– Architecture, Security, Systems Administration, and QA become universal responsibilities, with experts who set standards and build tools to enable the business to do the right thing.

– Business leaders set priorities and direction, and have close communication loops with teams doing implementation work.

Build a culture of personal empowerment and accountability

Have a strong reliance on centralized decision making and environmental gates.

Cannot ever point at individuals who are responsible for outcomes

Have few, if any, capable “full stack” engineers

“Architects” responsible for high level design, but no real commitment to implementation

Companies that get this wrong…

“Progress on safety coincides with learning from failure.

This makes punishment and learning two mutually exclusive activities

Treat failure as a learning opportunity

Organizations can either learn from an accident or punish the individuals involved in it, but hardly do both at the same time. ... Learning challenges and potentially changes the belief about what creates safety. Moreover, punishment emphasizes that failures are deviant, that they do not naturally belong in the organization...”

Sidney W.A. Dekker, Ten Questions about Human Error: A New View of No blame post-mortems

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lighttable/4981112645/sizes/o/in/photostream/

“The number 1 thing we can’t do is get in people’s way.”

Phil Dibowitz, Facebook

Become allergic to things that make you slow

Re-enforce culture with technology, and vice versa

“Tooling is culture institutionalized”

- Adam Jacob

Still with me?

• Christopher Brown• Chief Technical Officer• Twitter: @skeptomai, Email: cb@opscode.com