DevOps pushes two differing cultures together — developers and operations — nevertheless it gives IT a fighting chance at maintaining with the business.
A recent survey means that companies practicing DevOps deploy code 30 times more frequently than others. i am not surprised. Formerly few years, we have seen at Rackspace a surge renowned from customers who like to deploy massive amounts of code — weekly, daily, even hourly. Most of them do it using a DevOps approach, a technique we now have embraced as a corporation.
When we started offering a DevOps support service late last year, we did it with the conviction born of our own company’s experience. Using DevOps at Rackspace in an average year, we push code into production greater than 2,500 times, launch about 20 new cloud products, and run greater than 15,000 automated tests.
In the pre-cloud world, that might never had been possible. In actual fact, there wasn’t much incentive to work at such speed and scale. The age of web-scale computing has compressed the timeframes for everything, including the time for an app to draw its first million users.
[Want more on DevOps and continual delivery? Read Where Agile Development Fails: IT Operations.]
It took AOL about 10 years to arrive one million customers; Instagram attracted that many users in lower than three months.
But what exactly is DevOps and the way is it preparing us for the way forward for IT?
DevOps is greater than a hard and fast of automation tools. While it does include technology, it’s also a strategy and, to a point, even a philosophy. Just like the open-source movement or agile software development, DevOps holds certain truths to be self-evident: that shipping code faster and more error-free is inherently good; that automated testing at scale makes for a closer, safer product; that the true value of engineering talent isn’t the manual orchestration of administration tasks, however the insight and creativity to resolve interesting, real-world problems.
There are two unfolding trends in IT that make the DevOps approach particularly useful: integration and convergence.
We can most likely all agree that the era of monolithic, siloed it’s a thing of the past. Nowadays, it is not uncommon in finding a CMO with a larger technology budget than the CIO. It is a sign of industrial goals becoming more tightly integrated with the technology drivers of innovation.
In the present commercial landscape, there’s little patience for legacy IT systems and processes, for formal requests and capex forecasting. Companies of all sizes are adopting the tilt startup approach that gets developers, operations, and business folks talking each day. By integrating departments and bridging the distance between the business-minded and the tech-savvy, these companies can run faster and leaner than ever before. DevOps is without doubt one of the tools they are able to use to aid keep the full machine in alignment. When done well, it is able to do greater than automate testing and deployment; it would provide consistency and cohesion among all of the disparate groups that are suddenly working together toward the promise of continual delivery.
Meanwhile, convergence is everywhere — between technologies inside the same device and between technologies in multiple locations. Just as all of us now carry devices which have successfully converged telephony, messaging, and photography, the technologies on either side of the company firewall are blending together. Together with the proliferation of public, private, and hybrid clouds comes the necessity to manage all those different locations as one set of logical systems. Of course , your CEO and shareholders don’t care whether your app goes down by yourself network or somebody else’s, so why should your management, monitoring, and testing tools care?
A DevOps approach is very adept at maintaining with large, distributed systems and applications. It provides a framework for containing all of the moving parts together. Automated testing tools, auto-scaling processes, pre-defined, repeatable workflows — these are the foremost tangible sorts of a DevOps approach, and so they work whether the server you’re managing is downstairs or halfway around the globe.
Also, because DevOps is a cultural in addition to a technical approach (almost like agile development), any cloud provider already using it understands that your development cycles may very well be measured in hours as opposed to days. Hopefully, they’ve built the systems, tools, and support mechanisms to check that heightened sense of urgency.
Of course, adopting a DevOps approach isn’t without its challenges. At Rackspace, we were using elements of DevOps (comparable to automated testing) long before we were aware of embracing a brand new paradigm. But as we developed and refined our methodologies it became clearer that the toughest work was going to be cultural, not technical. It’s sometimes easier to construct tools that automate or define a repeatable workflow across thousands of servers and multiple environments than it is to get operations engineers and developers to interact within the required collaboration.
Why is that?
Traditionally, IT ops and software development were driven by different imperatives. Ops teams, principally else, has been charged with maintaining a stable environment by managing for risk. Developers, however, have worked in a continuing state of flux as they build, test, and ship code within the name of latest functionality. Their world of necessity tolerates a measure of instability. The challenge we faced at Rackspace as we evolved was bringing these two groups together and seeking to create a hard and fast of shared values. Fortunately, we’re an organization with a transparent set of core values, two of which easily fuel the DevOps mandate: “Results First” and “Full Disclosure and Transparency.”
As development and ops teams were combined, and as collaboration was dovetailed into the product development cycle, it helped our cause that we have got always encouraged transparency. It is a cornerstone of OpenStack, our culture, and our methodologies. We encourage open debate, but as a team it is the result that matters. Everyone has a voice on the table within the DevOps model — from the ops engineer who’s been burned by shoddy code to the developer who’s been stymied by numerous ops overhead — but when we are not shipping better code and product, faster, then it’s only a lot of talk. Ultimately, we ensured that developers and operations teams shared responsibility for both stability and time-to-release.
Of course, DevOps won’t work well for each organization, not less than not without fundamental change. For some companies, speed and agility are secondary. They’re willing to sacrifice time-to-market in favor of predictability. The ancient craft of it’s very good at that. Also, organizations which have large teams of siloed developers and operations engineers will find the trail to DevOps arduous. Or if the culture of it’s packed with turf wars or pockets of highly distributed and well guarded knowledge, then DevOps isn’t prone to succeed, in any case not without the cultural change that makes cross-functional collaboration possible.
As the digital world streams forward, the tried-and-true approaches of IT have began to lag behind. The web, the cloud, one million users in a couple of months — some of these things came along to disrupt the paradigm. It sort of feels to me that DevOps can be our greatest chance of maintaining with whatever comes next.
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CTO John Engates joined Rackspace in August 2000, only a year after the corporate was founded, as VP of Operations, managing the datacenter operations and customer-service teams. Most recently, John has played an active role inside the evolution and evangelism of Rackspace’s … View Full Bio
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