Practical DevOps

Chapter 1. Introduction to DevOps and Continuous Delivery

Welcome to Practical DevOps!

The first chapter of this book will deal with the background of DevOps and setting the scene for how DevOps fits into the wider world of Agile systems development.

An important part of DevOps is being able to explain to coworkers in your organization what DevOps is and what it isn't.

The faster you can get everyone aboard the DevOps train, the faster you can get to the part where you perform the actual technical implementation!

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

Introducing DevOps
How fast is fast?
The Agile wheel of wheels
The cargo cult Agile fallacy
DevOps and ITIL

Introducing DevOps

DevOps is, by definition, a field that spans several disciplines. It is a field that is very practical and hands-on, but at the same time, you must understand both the technical background and the nontechnical cultural aspects. This book covers both the practical and soft skills required for a best-of-breed DevOps implementation in your organization.

The word "DevOps" is a combination of the words "development" and "operation". This wordplay already serves to give us a hint of the basic nature of the idea behind DevOps. It is a practice where collaboration between different disciplines of software development is encouraged.

The origin of the word DevOps and the early days of the DevOps movement can be tracked rather precisely: Patrick Debois is a software developer and consultant with experience in many fields within IT. He was frustrated with the divide between developers and operations personnel. He tried getting people interested in the problem at conferences, but there wasn't much interest initially.

In 2009, there was a well-received talk at the O'Reilly Velocity Conference: "10+ Deploys per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr." Patrick then decided to organize an event in Ghent, Belgium, called DevOpsDays. This time, there was much interest, and the conference was a success. The name "DevOpsDays" struck a chord, and the conference has become a recurring event. DevOpsDays was abbreviated to "DevOps" in conversations on Twitter and various Internet forums.

The DevOps movement has its roots in Agile software development principles. The Agile Manifesto was written in 2001 by a number of individuals wanting to improve the then current status quo of system development and find new ways of working in the software development industry. The following is an excerpt from the Agile Manifesto, the now classic text, which is available on the Web at http://agilemanifesto.org/:

"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."

In light of this, DevOps can be said to relate to the first principle, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools."

This might be seen as a fairly obviously beneficial way to work—why do we even have to state this obvious fact? Well, if you have ever worked in any large organization, you will know that the opposite principle seems to be in operation instead. Walls between different parts of an organization tend to form easily, even in smaller organizations, where at first it would appear to be impossible for such walls to form.

DevOps, then, tends to emphasize that interactions between individuals are very important, and that technology might possibly assist in making these interactions happen and tear down the walls inside organizations. This might seem counterintuitive, given that the first principle favors interaction between people over tools, but my opinion is that any tool can have several effects when used. If we use the tools properly, they can facilitate all of the desired properties of an Agile workplace.

A very simple example might be the choice of systems used to report bugs. Quite often, development teams and quality assurance teams use different systems to handle tasks and bugs. This creates unnecessary friction between the teams and further separates them when they should really focus on working together instead. The operations team might, in turn, use a third system to handle requests for deployment to the organization's servers.

An engineer with a DevOps mindset, on the other hand, will immediately recognize all three systems as being workflow systems with similar properties. It should be possible for everyone in the three different teams to use the same system, perhaps tweaked to generate different views for the different roles. A further benefit would be smaller maintenance costs, since three systems are replaced by one.

Another core goal of DevOps is automation and Continuous Delivery. Simply put, automating repetitive and tedious tasks leaves more time for human interaction, where true value can be created.

How fast is fast?

The turnaround for DevOps processes must be fast. We need to consider time to market in the larger perspective, and simply stay focused on our tasks in the smaller perspective. This line of thought is also held by the Continuous Delivery movement.

As with many things Agile, many of the ideas in DevOps and Continuous Delivery are in fact different names of the same basic concepts. There really isn't any contention between the two concepts; they are two sides of the same coin.

DevOps engineers work on making enterprise processes faster, more efficient, and more reliable. Repetitive manual labor, which is error prone, is removed whenever possible.

It's easy, however, to lose track of the goal when working with DevOps implementations. Doing nothing faster is of no use to anyone. Instead, we must keep track of delivering increased business value.

For instance, increased communication between roles in the organization has clear value. Your product owners might be wondering how the development process is going and are eager to have a look. In this situation, it is useful to be able to deliver incremental improvements of code to the test environments quickly and efficiently. In the test environments, the involved stake holders, such as product owners and, of course, the quality assurance teams, can follow the progress of the development process.

Another way to look at it is this: If you ever feel yourself losing focus because of needless waiting, something is wrong with your processes or your tooling. If you find yourself watching videos of robots shooting balloons during compile time, your compile times are too long!

The same is true for teams idling while waiting for deploys and so on. This idling is, of course, even more expensive than that of a single individual.

While robot shooting practice videos are fun, software development is inspiring too! We should help focus creative potential by eliminating unnecessary overhead.

A death ray laser robot versus your team's productivity

Beware the cargo cult Agile fallacy

Richard Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in the field of quantum physics in 1965. He noticed a common behavior among scientists, in which they went though all the motions of science but missed some central, vital ingredient of the scientific process. He called this behavior "cargo cult science," since it was reminiscent of the cargo cults in the Melanesian South Sea islands. These cargo cults where formed during the Second World War when the islanders watched great planes land with useful cargo. After the war stopped, the cargo also stopped coming. The islanders started simulating landing strips, doing everything just as they had observed the American military do, in order for the planes to land.

A cargo cult Agile aeroplane

We are not working in an Agile or DevOps-oriented manner simply because we have a morning stand-up where we drink coffee and chat about the weather. We don't have a DevOps pipeline just because we have a Puppet implementation that only the operations team knows anything about.

It is very important that we keep track of our goals and continuously question whether we are doing the right thing and are still on the right track. This is central to all Agile thinking. It is, however, something that is manifestly very hard to do in practice. It is easy to wind up as followers of the cargo cults.

When constructing deployment pipelines, for example, keep in mind why we are building them in the first place. The goal is to allow people to interact with new systems faster and with less work. This, in turn, helps people with different roles interact with each other more efficiently and with less turnaround.

If, on the other hand, we build a pipeline that only helps one group of people achieve their goals, for instance, the operations personnel, we have failed to achieve our basic goal.

While this is not an exact science, it pays to bear in mind that Agile cycles, such as the sprint cycle in the Scrum Agile method, normally have a method to deal with this situation. In Scrum, this is called the sprint retrospective, where the team gets together and discusses what went well and what could have gone better during the sprint. Spend some time here to make sure you are doing the right thing in your daily work.

A common problem here is that the output from the sprint retrospective isn't really acted upon. This, in turn, may be caused by the unfortunate fact that the identified problems were really caused by some other part of the organization that you don't communicate well with. Therefore, these problems come up again and again in the retrospectives and are never remedied.

If you recognize that your team is in this situation, you will benefit from the DevOps approach since it emphasizes cooperation between roles in the organization.

To summarize, try to use the mechanisms provided in the Agile methods in your methods themselves. If you are using Scrum, use the sprint retrospective mechanism to capture potential improvements. This being said, don't take the methods as gospel. Find out what works for you.

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Mary Anne Thygesen Mar 18, 2016

Nicely written book. I shared it with my DevOps class

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Danny Mar 31, 2017

Quality book.

Per Hedman Feb 17, 2016

This book provides an insightful overview of how to get started with DevOps.The author makes the specific components of DevOps understandable and easily accessible both for developers and operations. The book is littered with examples and practical solutions to real world problems.The book nicely summarised all the aspects of the field of DevOps. It was an easy read and I highly recommended for anyone whose interested in DevOps.This book is an excellent primer in the field!

T. Cooke Jul 27, 2017

This book is a real eye-opener. I've been an IT professional for longer than I'd care to admit, most recently working outside the IT function - but engaged closely with IT colleagues - in a large business with complex internal and outsourced development and likewise infrastructure. While I recognise the philosophy/approach described in the book, I'd never come across most of the specific tools or appreciated how they can provide the sort of integrated approach described here. The book is high-level enough to explain the approach, interleaved with how-tos and examples that would give a flying start on actually implementing. Highly recommended.

Ian Stirk Apr 26, 2016

Hi,I have written a detailed chapter-by-chapter review of this book on www DOT i-programmer DOT info, the first and last parts of this review are given here. For my review of all chapters, search i-programmer DOT info for STIRK together with the book's title.This book aims to provide an introduction to DevOps from a practical perspective, how does it fare?DevOps is a skill increasingly in demand, it’s purpose is ‘...to make faster, more correct releases by bringing people working with different disciplines closer together.’The book is aimed at developers and system administrators. While no previous knowledge of DevOps is required, some background knowledge of Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Puppet etc is needed to get the most out of the book. It contains 210 working pages, spread over 10 chapters.Below is a chapter-by-chapter exploration of the topics covered.Chapter 1 Introduction to DevOps and Continuous DeliveryThe book opens with some history about DevOps, being a combination of the words ‘development’ and ‘operation’, it’s concerned with removing the wall between the two. It overlaps with Agile, automation and continuous delivery. The importance of communication, shared tools, cooperation between roles, and the meaning of waiting is discussed (waiting suggests something is wrong).The chapter continues with a look at the different cycles within Agile, including Scrum, and Kanban, explaining DevOps supports all cycles, and encourages cooperation between groups. Some examples of how DevOps benefits Agile cycles are given (e.g. faster regular deployments). The importance of doing Agile/DevOps for improved measurable results rather than just following the steps (i.e. cargo cults), is noted. DevOps aims to make interaction with new systems faster and easier, for everyone.The chapter ends with a brief look at how DevOps interacts with other ways of working. Typically, Agile or Lean frameworks work well with DevOps (since it came from Agile), however ITIL sometimes has problems, since it can be viewed as less flexible.This chapter provides a useful background about what DevOps is, where it came from, and how it interacts with other frameworks. The emphasis on interaction and communication is noted.The chapter is easy to read, well written, with useful diagrams, and helpful links to other chapters. It’s apparent that some knowledge of Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Puppet etc is needed to get the most out of the book. Perhaps these terms should have been defined here to ensure all reader are at the same level? I note Kanban is described in chapter 9. These traits apply to the whole of the book....ConclusionThis book aims to provide an introduction to DevOps from a practical perspective, and succeeds. The book is generally easy to read, well written, with useful diagrams, and helpful links to other chapters. The place of DevOps in the various stages of the Continuous Delivery pipeline is described well, and there are plenty of practical example problems and suggested solutions.It’s apparent that some background knowledge of Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Puppet etc is needed to get the most out of the book. It would have been useful to have defined some of these basic terms in Chapter 1, to ensure all readers are at the same assumed level of understanding.Some chapters, for example Chapter 3, have areas that aren’t cohesive, with subsections appearing without sufficient context or linkage.If you come from a Windows development/admin background you can expect a few more problems reading the text than if you’re from a Unix/Java background.Overall, this is a useful introduction and overview to DevOps.

Practical DevOps: Harness the power of DevOps to boost your skill set and make your IT organization perform better

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Practical DevOps

Chapter 1. Introduction to DevOps and Continuous Delivery

Introducing DevOps

How fast is fast?

The Agile wheel of wheels

Beware the cargo cult Agile fallacy

DevOps and ITIL

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