There are certain groups in the world that you just don’t expect to coexist. No, this is not a political blog, so we will not be talking about any of the world’s trouble spots. There are, after all, plenty of “dogs and cats” situations in just the narrow sliver of the world that is the technology marketplace. In fact, the “poster children” for this phenomenon is the Developer versus Operations situation. To be fair, this is not new – even back when “Operations” was called “Systems” and it was all one big computer, there was a wall between the two disciplines.
I have long believed that this is a product of the fact that the intrinsic disciplines that these two groups represent are direct opposites. In other words, the creativity valued by developers is the direct antithesis of the rigor and consistency valued by operations folks. The conflict that this creates, however, is something we all recognize as being a necessary inefficiency. One side drives new solutions and the other makes sure the new solutions are available to users. When those two are in balance, projects succeed. When they are not, projects fail. So, if project success metrics are to be believed, things are catastrophically out of balance about half the time.
That is really unacceptable in any other area of business. Just as various line-of-business processes went through an alignment of supply chains and “just in time” inventory to make the actual business more agile and responsive years ago, tech shops are now working hard to become agile and responsive to the businesses they serve. The problem, of course, is that the wall between development and operations still exists. And the ops guys are still ‘preventers’ and the developers are still creators of ‘bugs and downtime’.
The times, they are a changin’
The movement to Agile/Lean/Scrum/etc. is actually driving fundamental change for the first time in a long time. Experience delivering highly dynamic web-facing services is showing the value of aligning development and operations into a single, coherent whole. We, here in Automation Land, have been discussing this indirectly for a while with our Build/Test/Deploy message and have been evangelizing the concept of “Dev Ops” for a while. For example, I created the image below about a year ago to help some of my development-centric colleagues visualize the “DevOps” gap and highlight where automation is valuable.
But DevOps is a much bigger movement and there is a confluence of technologies that is starting to turn shards of related ideas into a much more revolutionary set of topics. The three main drivers seem to be at the collision of Agile, VM/Cloud, and Automation. It is early days, to be sure, but Agile seems to be driving the change, VM/Cloud technologies to provide aligned infrastructure quickly, and automation to tie it all together.
What’s more, people are now gathering to proactively talk about this. It is no longer just vendors and consultants in isolation. I actually was at two events in the last 7 days where the “DevOps” collision point was a prime topic of discussion. The first was Opscamp where about 100 people participated in an “un-conference” all day Saturday to discuss modern operations issues. The group’s first topic suggestion was “DevOps” and there was an immediate, lively discussion of about 5 different sub-topics when it got written at the top of the flip-chart. There were several related sessions during the day. The second event was the regular meeting of Agile Austin where Redmonk analyst Michael Coté led a discussion around the dev-side perspective and how new technologies made it imperative for development to become truly involved and aware of operations in an Agile processes.
The common thread from both sessions was that the two groups must build bridges and understand each other. Everyone is truly in the same boat and infrastructure now must evolve with applications at the same rate. It is no longer acceptable for the infrastructure to behave as roommates – they must become a truly symbiotic individual.
There is one fly in the ointment, however. As you’ll see above, the Operations guys and the Dev guys still met separately. But at least they both talked about the same problem in similar ways. I personally hold out hope for the Dogs and Cats of technology to begin living together happily – if for no other reason than business and the speed of the modern technology marketplace will make them.
Dan
David
pinduni
Carlos
