DevOps in the Enterprise

DevOps Is DevOps Is DevOps

This is Bridget Kromhout's first episode as official co-host. She's an operations engineer at DramaFever who says she's been "a BOFH at places many hundreds of times this size." The panel is Michael Ducy of Chef, Ross Clanton, who leads part of operations at Target, and Steve Pereira of MyPlanet in Toronto, who helps big companies get started with DevOps and Agile and runs the DevOps and OpenStack meetups there.

Michael's position is "DevOps is DevOps is DevOps": the principles of continuous improvement are the same everywhere, and an enterprise just has more, sometimes political, nuances to dance around. Ross agrees, whether you're an enterprise, a startup or a unicorn, and adds that a large company like Target carries the technology debt it built up over the years, and a mindset shift across a large organization is a challenge that's "rewarding, it's frustrating, it's all kinds of things." Steve calls DevOpsDays "this magical camp where we all sort of get away from our jobs."

DevOpsDays Inside Target

Ross and his colleague Heather Mickman started an internal DevOpsDays at Target almost a year earlier, and have held three, quarterly, with a big annual one coming in February. The tagline is Connect, Share, Learn, and the aim is to get people across silos together by choice. The first drew 160 or 170 people, with Michael and an external speaker from Nordstrom, and Michael's talk "The Goat in the Silo" is still discussed by engineers there. Michael says enterprises don't realize they have enormous tech communities inside them that they haven't used, and that when Ross and Heather spoke at DevOpsDays Minneapolis about Target's transformation, it changed people's assumptions about the company.

Do Enterprises Just Need the Automation Part?

Matty says his reading of enterprise DevOps is often CAMS without the C, on the assumption that they don't need the hippie-dippy culture, just good automation and stats. He says you can't cherry-pick, and that the traditional DevOps community talks about empathy so much this year because it feels it already has automation figured out. Ross says culture is the most critical part, since it amounts to mindset, and the rest follows as an outcome. He heard at the Enterprise DevOps Summit a mix of top-down and bottom-up approaches, and the theme that everyone is now shifting to optimize for speed.

Steve says many of those companies' transformations took three to six years, and that culture is like steering a giant tanker, and he heard that many started because they were in a mess and had no other option. He hopes that won't continue, now that there's data. Michael disagrees: the body of knowledge was already there, and real change comes only from "oh my God, I have to," so "there's going to be a lot more bloodshed." Ross's own moment came from reading The Phoenix Project, having felt he'd lived its characters. He says the way to make DevOps stick in a big company is to find each person's pain points and help them past those, which is a localized and time-consuming approach, and not to inundate them with concepts like promise theory.

The Conference Bridge Problem

Bridget tells of meeting three people from Thomson Reuters at DevOpsDays Ghent, who mostly wanted to hear about team chat. Their pain point was incidents, where everyone sits on a conference bridge and each new arrival needs a summary, so they hear it "like 14 times in a row." She showed them Slack, and two of them downloaded it at the table. Ross says persistent chat has created a lot of aha moments in some groups at Target too.

Sharing, Open Source, and Auditors

Matty says a few years ago it seemed only Netflix, Facebook and Etsy were doing DevOps, but the larger companies just weren't sharing, and some places told employees not to tell anyone how they did it. Ross says most enterprises don't fully embrace open source and rarely let people present or blog externally. Target's public tech blog was only three or four months old, and it's starting to contribute to open source, though "it's going to be a slog."

Steve says one of the best threads at the Enterprise Summit was audit and compliance, with auditors on panels explaining how working with them within DevOps principles benefits a company. That matters, he says, because the fear that devs will run wild on production has kept many from taking DevOps seriously.

Culture Isn't a Checklist

Steve says the culture side is what everyone finds most intimidating, and that sharing is how someone at the bottom gets the conversation with leadership started. Bridget recalls Steve's Ignite about DevOps as a MacGuffin, and Michael's slide of an overly process-driven dystopia, where holding too rigidly to something like CAMS becomes dogma too. Michael says tools and even processes are easy, and that "the organizational management issues are the real challenge." He says the summit consolidated a lot of enterprise information in one place, and proposes an enterprise DevOps podcast. Ross is game, suggests "Arrested Enterprise DevOps," and Bridget says she looks forward to listening "from a safe distance."

One Piece of Advice

Michael's advice is that it's "probably going to piss a lot of people off" and you need to find allies. Ross says be very patient, and describes a Venn diagram his colleague Jason Walker draws on whiteboards, with three circles, collaboration, empathy and experiential learning, and DevOps at the center. Steve's is that sharing is how you start. Matty's is that you probably already do some of this under other names, and that with a transformation you should do a pilot and stack the deck for results. Trevor's is to advocate your problems and say what hurts, since you'll find everyone shares the same hurts. Bridget says you can't do everything at once, so if all you manage is getting ops into scrums, that's a start, or adding someone who knows what's going on to the change advisory board.

Checkouts

Ducy

• The Goat Farm podcast

Ross

• All the great talks from the Enterprise DevOps Summit, DOES14
• Target Tech Blog (post on flashbuilds)

Steve

• ALL THE TWEETS!
• Debian snapshots
• Amazon Lambda/CodeDeploy/Containers (in case it’s not covered in the AWS recap)
• My recap doc of DOES14, pretty rough but shareable

Bridget

• devopsdays.org - for a devops near you, or to be inspired by talks at past ones so you can hold one inside your org
• Lots of great talks last week at DevOpsDays Vancouver, and one you should definitely watch is Stephanie Van Dyk, a Google SRE who worked on the healthcare.gov rescue.

Trevor

• Worm Robot
• Big Hero 6
• Barbiefail

Matt

• Yak Shaving Expert t-shirt
• Customizing Chef by Jon Cowie
• Have you tried turning it on and off again supercut from the IT Crowd