DevOps Transformation: Leave No Ops Behind

In adopting DevOps, it’s easy to forget what you know

Have you ever found yourself struggling to explain something that you know how to do without a moment’s thought? I’m not talking about the amygdala, the part of our brain that initiates the automatic “fight or flight” response. No, I’m referring more to the muscle memory-type behaviors that we’ve collected through life and, likely, pay little attention to while executing.

Things We Take for Granted

Muscle memory is awesome. Through the magic of muscle memory I can type fast (occasionally with okay-ish accuracy). It enables me to drive in peak-hour traffic without having a nervous breakdown, and it’s the only way I can ski down a tree-lined path without ending up in hospital.

It’s through training, practice and repetition that we can carry out an increasing list of mundane tasks without being distracted from the bigger picture. In contrast, consider the expanding influence of DevOps across organizations, and how we’re pushing developer principles and practices onto operational facilities that have never been exposed to such. We’re asking people to break a habit of a lifetime and to think like a developer practically overnight. This can create some significant speed bumps in your operation transformation toward achieving continuous deployment pipelines.

Type Mismatch Error

On one side we’ve got infrastructure operations, where we’ve seen two decades of little change in the way services are provisioned and managed. Heck, for the most part, spreadsheets are still the source of truth—spreadsheets without versioning!

There’s no “commit log” trail, no integrated testing and definitely no consistency across the vendor technologies that must be managed. Imagine what root cause analysis after an outage looks like? A team huddle for a round of “Who touched it last?”

To software engineers, it must seem like the Wild West but, it’s important to acknowledge that this problem is largely the fault of the technology vendors. Until the principles and practices of DevOps shone a very bright light on operational inefficiencies, infrastructure operations weren’t challenged to increase the speed of business. Hence, the technology vendors hadn’t been pressured to evolve.

A New Hope (Yes, Like ‘Star Wars’)

Most infrastructure vendors have responded to the DevOps calling by re-architecting products in support of programmability. Many of them have even done an alright job of it, adhering to RESTful standards and publishing API schemas. However, there’s one key element that’s missing, and will be the cause of further challenges if not addressed.

To an experienced developer, operating with declarative interfaces, idempotency and continuous integration is practically muscle memory. But to infrastructure operations, it is completely foreign. Progressing with the kind of operational transformation required to achieve continuous deployment is possible but only though closing this operating model gap.

“Give me a Swiss army knife, and MacGyver I do not become,” said I at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2017.

As the lines between development and operations increasingly blur, be super-aware of the development principles and practices that are just a part of life for the software engineers. To close the operating model gaps, run workshops for your pals in operations. Teach them all the fancy words. Show them how to manage their config files and architectural notes in a code repository, so they can familiarize themselves with the tooling.

Most importantly, leave no ops behind!

— Nathan Pearce