Richard Siddaway's Blog

DevOps has never really excited me and I never understood why until I read about DevOps team structures – https://web.devopstopologies.com/

The article suggests 7 bad practices or ‘anti-types:

1. Dev and Ops Silos
2. DevOps Team Silo
3. Dev doesn’t need Ops
4. DevOps as tools team
5. Rebranded administrators
6. Ops embedded in dev team
7. Dev and DBA silos

It then looks at some team structures that can be made to work

1. Dev and Ops collaboration
2. Fully Shared Ops responsibilities
3. Ops as Infrastructure as a Service
4. DevOps as external service
5. DevOps team with expiry date
6. DevOps evangelist team
7. Site Reliability Engineering team
8. Container driven collaboration
9. Dev and DBA collaboration

One thing that’s often not explicitly mentioned when discussing DevOps is the need for whatever teams, and individuals, to communicate. This is often anathema in my experience and why a DevOps type approach is so badly needed.

As to why DevOps hasn’t excited me – the article made me realise I’d spent a good part of my working life moving between Dev & Ops and often occupying the middle, grey area that DevOps makes its own. Its what I’ve been doing for a long time mainly without the tools we have today and not viewing it as anything special – just getting the job done.

DevOps is the latest “big thing” in IT. Whether it will make a difference or be dropped as everyone rushes to embrace the next “big thing” only time will tell.

For now, there’s a free ebook from the DevOps Collective (the people who bring you the PowerShell Summit) that looks at DevOps from the OPs perspective:

https://www.gitbook.com/book/devopscollective/devops-the-ops-perspective/details

DevOps is the latest IT fashion.

That statement is more than likely viewed as a heresey by many people in IT. A few years ago Cloud could have been the first word in the sentence and a few years before that virtualisation.

IT has a long history of jumping on band wagons and deciding that X is the solution to all our problems.

The reality is that sometimes it is and sometimes it just isn’t.

Many people state that in a DevOps environment  your servers become throw away objects because you have to  rebuild them so fast to keep up with application changes.

Really

With some applications this is perfectly true and a DevOps infrastructure as code/continuous delivery mechanism is exactly what you need to rebuild every week, every day or even every hour.

Do I want to rebuild my mail servers on that schedule? What about database servers, your CRM system or your big file servers.

No thanks I’ll rebuild those when I need to.

DevOps has some great concepts and the PRINCIPLES of DevOps should be absorbed by every IT department but that doesn’t mean you treat every server the same and treat as expendable.

Some servers really are special and need a more traditional approach

The slides and code from my WinOps 2016 talk can be found here:

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=43CFA46A74CF3E96!79154&authkey=!AKIt7btEZsahTf8&ithint=file%2czip

During the WinOps conference – http://winops.org/ – I attended a session on DevOps culture. At one point the discussion got on to skill sets.

I introduced the concept of the Y shaped skillset.

You should have a deep understanding on at least one area – C# development, Active Directory, web development, Exchange management – whatever it is you should a ‘go to’ person for that area. That’s represented by the down stroke of the Y

In addition in a devops world you ideally need a bunch of skills that span the devops range. At the top you should have a broad understanding across the range of skills – at least enough to have sensible conversations with other practitioners. Those skills can be backed up with a few areas that complement your main skill as you drop deeper into the Y.

Over time you may see your main skill set change and what was your primary skill migrate into a secondary area to be replaced by something else.

Next time you’re wondering what to learn – think of this model and think about what skills you need to add to complement and build on your current skill set

The WinOps conference is dedicated to ‘Windows in a DevOps World’  Its in London 24 May 2016. I’ll be speaking as will Jeffrey Snover and Ed Wilson of Microsoft.

More details from http://winops.org/

Hope to see you there

Do you know a young person in the USA that is just starting their IT career and would benefit from an intensive training program and scholarship?

Point them to the DevOps Collective site (DevOps Collective is the parent organization for powershell.org)  https://devopscollective.org/2016/04/04/announcing-the-getgoing-it-ops-education-program-scholarship/

Initially this program is US only but we hope to make a global program in years to come

My Infrastructiure as Code article – part of an introducing DevOps series – has gone live http://ed-baker.com/devops-practices-infrastructure-as-code/

You can also link to it through http://blogs.technet.com/b/uktechnet/ where you’ll find the first in my series of article on PowerShell. Second one will be coming in the New Year

The call for topics for the PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit (renamed PowerShell Summit) has been extended.

If you’re thinking of submitting please do so.

If you want some ideas fro topics we’ll consider – see http://powershell.org/wp/2015/09/16/speaking-at-powershell-summit-2016-topic-ideas-for-aspiring-speakers/

The WinOps conference will take place 22 September 2015 in London.

Details from http://winops.org/

Its all about “Windows in a DevOps world”