DevOps is making its way through every industry yet is still a concept that is not widely understood. A recent episode of the Federal Tech Talk series provides a perspective on DevOps including some insights on the definition, how to start practicing DevOps, and where to learn more. Checkout “Three different perspectives on DevOps” on Federal News Radio.
The panelists for the show were Brent Wodicka of AIS, David Bock of Excella Consulting, and myself. The panel discussion was moderated by John Gilroy.
First a definition of DevOps:
A cultural and professional movement, focused on how to build and operate high-velocity organizations, born for the experience of its practitioners.
This definition gets to the heart of what DevOps is trying to achieve and should be familiar to any practitioner of Chef-style DevOps.
As panelists, we explored the idea of making sure that objectives and motivations across teams are fully aligned. Developers, operators, and everyone across the organization must align to the needs of the customers or constituents and the business or agency in order to deliver.
The scale of today’s infrastructure and applications require automation as a foundation of any software-driven organization. Scale comes not just in the number of servers but also the number of engineers working on the systems and the complexity of the applications they deliver. As teams adopt DevOps there is a lot of work to do in modernizing both the infrastructure and the applications. Chef customers like the SAP NS2 and the National Geospatial Agency (NGA) are building on a foundation of Chef-powered automation to modernize their operations.
The panel also discussed the importance of collaboration among software developers and other technology professionals. The discussion also includes sharing code on GitHub, working with open-source communities, and building internal communities of practice.
When it came time to discuss learning more about DevOps the panelists had plenty of ideas.
The show also covers some of the historical context for DevOps and discussed how it is really an extension of the agile methodologies that have had success with software development teams for years.
The discussion wrapped up with some predictions of the future. Spoiler alert: DevOps is about helping technology deliver business value and it is here to stay.