Death to the DevOps team - Agile Cambridge 2014

Death to the DevOps team!

How to avoid another siloMatthew Skelton, Skelton Thatcher Consulting

Agile Cambridge 2014,

Friday 3rd October 2014, Cambridge, UK

#agilecam

DevOps‘DevOps’

Team topologiesFlow exercisesChoosing tools

RecruitmentEmpathy Snap

Matthew Skelton

•Building & operating commercial software systems since 1998

•Cybernetics + Neuroscience + Music• control engineering• psychology• ‘network’ and group interactions

@matthewpskelton

Skelton ThatcherIntroduction and Services Overview

‘Cloud’ changes the way we mustdesign, deliver, and operate

our software systems

Changes for ‘cloud’

DevOps‘DevOps’

Not DevOps:

“Automation”“Build & Release”

“Infrastructure Development”“System Administration”

DevOps“Highly effective, daily collaboration between

software developers and IT operations people to produce relevant, working systems” *

*also QA/Testing, IT Service Desk, Programme Management, Commercial, Marketing, etc.

Sectors

•Tourism•Betting •Travel booking•Legal software•Healthcare

•Financial data & reporting•Government agencies•Foreign Exchange

Organisations

1.Financial data2.Legal software3.Travel booking

Team topologiesFlow exercisesChoosing tools

RecruitmentEmpathy Snap

Team Topologies

http://bit.ly/DevOpsTopologies

HT: @EricMinick, IBM

Organisations

1.Financial data2.Legal software3.Travel booking

1. Financial data

Goal: shorter Lead TimeNo ‘DevOps’ team

Challenge: define the purpose of the new team(s)

(‘naming things is hard’)

1. Financial data

?

1. Financial data

Are the main challenges technical?

(Clue: probably not)

1. Financial data

Evolve the team(s) over 2 yearsClarity of purpose

Spread culture

2. Legal software

Genuine ‘no Ops’

Challenge: avoid a ‘tooling takeover’

2. Legal software

? ?

2. Legal software

Grow an Operations capabilityUse and train the Support team

‘SRE’ or ‘Web Operations’

3. Travel booking

Service Desk silo

Challenge: slow or limited feedback from Production

3. Travel booking

??

3. Travel booking

Collaboration with shared toolsVisualise and broadcast

Retain Ops discipline

Team topology determines recruitment needs

Team Topologies

http://bit.ly/DevOpsTopologies

https://github.com/ SkeltonThatcher/DevOpsTopologies

https://twitter.com/EricMinick/status/517335119330172930

There is no ‘right’ team topology, but several ‘bad’ topologies for

any one organisation

Team topologiesFlow exercisesChoosing tools

RecruitmentEmpathy Snap

Flow Exercises

Experience DevOpsA hands-on workshop for

DevOps culture

experiencedevops.org

@jamesbetteley

@johnC_bristol

2 Dev teams, 1 Ops team

Ops team did ‘stop the line’

2x throughput!

Service Teams

Modelling teams & constraintsSingle team

Two Dev teams, one Ops teamTwo service teams (Dev + Ops)

Provisioning delaysBacklog item prioritisation

“… organising the North of England’s

largest ball flow game”

Explore topology effectiveness with different constraints

Drive team topology with metrics from flow exercises!

Team topologiesFlow exercisesChoosing tools

RecruitmentEmpathy Snap

Choosing Tools

http://rashidkpc.github.io/Kibana/images/screenshots/searchss.png

“How does [the use of] this tool help people to collaborate*?”

* Work together, at the same keyboard/screen

‘How to choose tools for DevOps and Continuous Delivery’

http://bit.ly/ChooseDevOpsTools

‘DZone guide to Continuous Delivery 2014’

http://bit.ly/DZoneCDreport

How to choose tools for DevOpsValue collaboration aspects

Avoid a learning mountain: evolve toolingAvoid Production-only tools

Consider Conway’s Law

(this list is incomplete!)

Team topologiesFlow exercisesChoosing tools

RecruitmentEmpathy Snap

Recruitment

Don’t hire ‘DevOps’

Recruitment suggestions

Site Reliability Engineers (SRE)

Web Operations (‘WebOps’?)

SysAdmin + Git + TDD (?)

Recruitment suggestions

DiplomacyFacilitating

EvangelisingMentor

Deep specialism in SAN fabrics

Yes, we still need operationsMetrics

Layer 2 / 3 subtletiesRapid diagnosisFault heuristics

Incident response experience‘Battle-scars’

Recruiting for DevOpsDon’t hire ‘DevOps’

Don’t advertise for ‘DevOps Engineer’

Use SRE / WebOps / TDD

Don’t forget Operations skills!

Team topologiesFlow exercisesChoosing tools

RecruitmentEmpathy Snap

Empathy Snap

Empathy Snap

http://bit.ly/EmpathySnap

Recapitulation

How to avoid another silo

Team topologies

There is no ‘right’ topologyMany ‘wrong’ topologies for one organisation

Consider skills, core business, SLAs, …Evolve the topology over time (2 years)

Communicate the purpose

Flow exercises

Adapt to include IT Ops peopleLearning through physical interaction

Model and measure flowFlow exercises help choose a team topology

Other things

Consider the collaboration value in all toolsShared tools for shared responsibilities

Don’t hire ‘DevOps’Encourage empathy

We did not really mention:

Funding: CapEx vs OpExBonuses & financial rewards / penalties

Building a cultureConway’s Law

…

Death to the ‘DevOps’ team

Long live the DevOps team

Further readingBuild Quality Inbuildqualityin.com

Forewords by Dave Farley and Patrick Debois

Discount for #AgileCam !https://leanpub.com/buildqualityin/c/AgileCam2014

http://bit.ly/BQI-AgileCam2014

Valid until 10th October 2014

Further reading@annashipman – DevOps @ GDS (Build Quality In)

http://markosrendell.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/calling-devops-teams-an-antipattern-is-an-antipattern/

http://www.slideshare.net/Urbancode/building-a-devops-team-that-isnt-evil/15

http://seroter.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/8-characteristics-of-our-devops-organization-2/

http://devops.com/blogs/buzzword-abuse-anatomy-devops-engineer/

Allan Kelly on Conway’s Law: https://vimeo.com/channels/londoncd/85378217

Thank you!

http://skeltonthatcher.com/

enquiries@skeltonthatcher.com

@SkeltonThatcher

+44 (0)20 8242 4103