Some interesting and lots of the usual around the DeOps blog beat last week and over the weekend. An interesting piece by Daniel Bryant on his Tai-Dev Blog on why “Chuck Norris doesn’t do DevOps”. It is actually a video of a presentation he gave at the recent London Java Community event and is the subject of a talk that Bryant has been working on for some time. You can also see the slides from the show on slideshare here.
Chuck Norris doesn’t do DevOps because he doesn’t have to. Chuck can do everything and he can do it by himself. He has no need to work with Dev or Ops, he does it all. But for the rest of us, to get something done we have to work as part of a team. As such we need DevOps to help us work better, faster deeper. So until we are all as good as Chuck Norris, we need to keep at it.
To understand why Chuck Norris doesn’t do DevOps, do we have to also define DevOps? Hasn’t been there enough good descriptions of what DevOps is? Usually when you keep seeing people trying to solve the same issue over and over again, it generally means it hasn’t been done satisfactorily to date. Is this the case with a definition of DevOps? You would think so by how “What is DevOps” blog posts we see.
Vishal Biyani on his blog last week writes exactly that. It is actually part of one of a multi-part series of blog posts that will according to Biyani cover:
- Getting basics right: What is DevOps anyway? (This post)
- It’s all about delivering: CI & CD
- Configuration Chaos : Managing your infrastructure, as code!
- Monitor, measure and move: From logs to performance and beyond
- Putting it all together: Collaborate, communicate and continuously improve
- Further Reading
Giving Biyani credit he refers back to Magnus Hedemark at Redhat. The first part explains the basic premise behind DevOps, a brief history and the motive behind the DevOps movement.
I think this is what we should do more often. Refer back to a well written definition that we can point to with consistency rather than having as many definitions of DevOps as there are stars in the sky. An example is OlinData who back in January wrote a well done “what is DevOps” post. It is no worse than countless others I have seen. The issue, how many more people will write their own definition instead of just pointing at OlinData’s or Dev2Ops.com definition or any others.
As long as we spend so many cycles defining what DevOps is, we are wasting cycles that we could be using on doing DevOps and expanding DevOps knowledge. I think we have beaten the what it is fairly well by now, let’s move on.
An example of moving on is the “BlueMIx” 100 Days announced by IBM and written about on this IBM blog. I will be writing more about IBM and BlueMix, but suffice to say here, IBM is scheduling 100 workshops around the world to help Developers do DevOps with some pretty cool tools from Big Blue. It promises to be a great event if you can get to one in your area.
Another good example of blogs moving DevOps forward is the Ranger4 blog. They had a good post up with the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Continuous Delivery Experts. Good article that take it to the next level.
Anyway, that is my report today. For those that notice these things, I will be handling the Cup o’ Joe blog here for a while, as reading blogs is something I do. You can write me at ashimmy@devops.com if you have something on your blog you want us to mention.
