Daniel Lauzon

One Hundred Hellos - Blog

Cloud and DevOps - 27 April 2011 - devops

Nothing new under the sun, All Things Old Are New Again, and yet it sure feels like the field of IT is undergoing constant and qualitative change.

There has been much buzz recently around something called DevOps, and much as Cloud Computing before it, it is rather hard to define precisely.

For our purposes, Devops, is not so much a set of specific tools and practices, as it is an invitation to broaden the scope of many established practices to include aspects which had hitherto been considered unrelated. Devops borows heaviliy from the toolset of Agile Development and extends their use into other fields such as IT Operations.

It should always be kept in mind however that these practices are meant to solve business problems, and should not be viewed as dogma. They must therefore be tailored and sequenced in the context of you own organization.

Examples

It would be unthinkable today to implement a developpment process that doesn't include some kind of version control and testing/QA workflow, but what about server configuration, does it benefit from the same tools' advantages. Tools like Chef and Puppet make these things possible.

Whatever state of maturity of automated testing you operate in, wouldn't it be desirable that your software builds be tested under conditions that closely resemble actual deployment conditions. Tools like Vagrant and Selenium allow us to describe in code some of our operating assumptions about browsers and servers and can be integrated into automated build cycles.

We all have first hand experience with social media tools, such as facebook, flickr, and the benefits of their ease of use. Github has extended some of these social inetraction paradigms into the world of software development, with one-click forking and sharing of entire projects.

The way forward

The widespread availability and low-or-no cost of these tools, makes them quite easy to experiment with, before you commit to them in a more formal and definitive way. So go ahead, get your feet wet, you'll never look back.

I suggest you look at your current operations, no doubt there are some irritants which could use some loving attention; then try to see if some of these pratices can be creatively and efficiently be put to use.

Think: repeatable, measurable, testable.

Also, thinking of your organisations' strategic objectives, try to see if some of these tools and practices could give you a competitive advantage, before your competitors do!

These are a few of my favorite things...