Given that social coding is a thing, what about the other side? Operations has the same image of lone wolves solving problems in the dark. The culture of on-call is built around the concept that when you’re holding the pager, you’re the one on the front lines, so that everyone else can sleep.
Social operations, the ops in DevOps, is going to be about the same things that made social coding important: knocking down walls between individuals; making the knowledge of a system or infrastructure explicit and available, in context. But social operations is more difficult in two major ways: operations problems are often multidisciplinary, and often temporal – meaning that you have to be social when the situation arises,not on your time!
When I say that operations problems are multidisciplinary, I mean that solving a problem in an operational context might require a number of people with different domain expertise. The solution is going to be much more complex and may not be portable to other people. Fixing something that’s wrong with a puppet script inside of our own infrastructure is fundamentally different than contributing a bug fix back to an open source project, or otherwise contributing to an open development environment.
And when I say that operations problems are temporal, I mean that many of the forms of social engagement we’re getting used to in a social coding environment – forums, pull requests, etc. – are eminently useless when you’re in a firefight. When something’s wrong enough that you’re being paged at 2am, waiting for someone to respond to a comment thread on a pull request isn’t an option. You have to be able to get the right eyes on the problem, in a timely manner, if you want to solve infrastructure problems faster.
So, how can we make the operations side of DevOps social? What parts of “social” are useful in the context of an operations issue?
Opening up the knowledge of your team is a good place to start. Having the ability to get people involved is another good thing. Basically, what can we do to make it so that you know what you need to know, whether that’s how a problem was solved in the past, who’s available to get help, or what else is going on. That’s what we’re trying to figure out at VictorOps.
