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Tag: culture shift

  • ‘Big Bang’ DevOps: Posting from the Professor

    ‘Big Bang’ DevOps: Posting from the Professor

    I learned about The Diffusion of Innovation Theory in a DevOps Foundation training course. I wanted to get my DevOps certification, but more than that, to learn about what makes a DevOps initiative successful. When I mentioned the Diffusion of Innovation Theory to a coworker, he said, “It sounds like Sheldon talking to Raj on ‘The Big Bang Theory’ television series.”  Although the name sounds “Big Bang”-ish, the usage of this theory could be the real difference for success in any transformational change including DevOps.

    Let’s begin with the definition of DevOps. DevOps is a professional and cultural movement that that stresses communication, collaboration, integration and automation to improve the flow of work between software developers and IT operations professionals. Improved workflows will result in an improved ability to design, develop, deploy and operate software and services faster. That’s where this “Big Bang” or Diffusion of Innovation Theory comes in. DevOps is a culture shift.

    DevOps requires us to shatter the silos and to quickly integrate our teams to increase the flow of work from idea to end of life for the strategy, development, deployment and the sustaining of service over their life. Adoption of a new idea, behavior or product (i.e., innovation) does not happen simultaneously in a social system. It is a process whereby some people are more apt to adopt the innovation than others. Researchers have found that people who adopt an innovation early have different characteristics than people who adopt an innovation later. Learning what those characteristics are and then how to apply the proper technique for each will help with the management of organizational change.

    The Diffusion of Innovation is a theory that seeks to explain how, why and at what rate new ideas and technology spread. While most of the general population tends to fall in the middle categories, it is still necessary to understand the characteristics of a given target population.

    When promoting an innovation, there are different strategies used to appeal to the different adopter categories:

    • Innovators – want to be the first to try the innovation. They are venturesome and interested in new ideas. These people are very willing to take risks and are often the first to develop new ideas. Very little, if anything, needs to be done to appeal to this population.
    • Early Adopters – represent opinion leaders. They enjoy leadership roles and embrace change opportunities. They are already aware of the need to change and so are very comfortable adopting new ideas. Strategies to appeal to this population include how‐to manuals and information sheets on implementation. They do not need information to convince them to change.
    • Early Majority – rarely leaders, but they do adopt new ideas before the average person. That said, they typically need to see evidence that the innovation works before they are willing to adopt it. Strategies to appeal to this population include success stories and evidence of the innovation’s effectiveness.
    • Late Majority – skeptical of change and will only adopt an innovation after it has been tried by the majority. Strategies to appeal to this population include information on how many other people have tried the innovation and have adopted it successfully.
    • Laggards ‐ bound by tradition and very conservative. They are very skeptical of change and are the hardest group to bring on board. Strategies to appeal to this population include statistics, fear appeals and pressure from people in the other adopter groups.

    When promoting an innovation to a target population, it is important to understand the characteristics of the target population that will help or hinder adoption of the innovation. The Diffusion of Innovation Theory could be the “Big Bang” that you are looking for to ensure the success of your DevOps initiative.

    — Alice Acedia

  • First We Fixed Dev, But Let’s Not Forget About Ops

    First We Fixed Dev, But Let’s Not Forget About Ops

    Since its beginning in 2008, DevOps has gone from an underground rebellion by developers to a mainstream movement with representatives in every industry and at every scale. You can see the change just by looking at how people attending DevOps events dress: the black T-shirts are still there, but these days there are lots of suits and ties as well. Another hallmark of this success is companies trying to fit DevOps into their existing conceptual frameworks—hence, the plethora of “ITIL and DevOps” papers out there.

    Despite all this success, though, the DevOps movement is still young. Of course, things move fast in IT, but we aren’t talking about a technology or a technique that can be adopted rapidly and spread very widely. Committing to DevOps is a major cultural shift for organizations, and that takes time. Some organizations have been doing DevOps for five years and have fully re-engineered their processes around this new approach, but most are still only at the beginning of their DevOps journey. As William Gibson said, “The future is here; it’s just not evenly distributed.”

    First Things First: Speed Up Releases

    The early phase of DevOps adoption focuses on activities around releasing code to production, because that was the bottleneck that the DevOps movement was originally created to break. While it still may be too soon to declare victory, it’s safe to say the improvement in the release process is enormous. Today, any new project that does not propose to implement DevOps principles would have to have a very good reason and explanation.

    Notice that qualification about new projects. It’s easy to adopt DevOps methodologies and expectations in a greenfield situation; however, it is much harder in a brownfield project, where previous cultural norms have been expressed in tooling and processes that are hard to change in-flight. The good thing is that over time, the old way of doing things will die off naturally, as code bases get re-engineered, ported and replaced. Eventually, every project will be a DevOps project.

    DevOps image

    Are We Running So Fast That Others Can’t Keep Up?

    DevOps, however, is not just about release and deployment. It also covers operation of what has been deployed. It’s right there in the name, after all! Coming from an operations background, though, there can be a feeling that DevOps is not for “people like me.” Some simplistic interpretations of DevOps focus on the sometimes adversarial relationship between Dev and Ops, forgetting that good Ops people are just as incentivized as Devs to get Devs more involved in Ops.

    One of the difficulties that arise when engineers try to “do the DevOps” without involving Ops is that Ops are not ready to join in. When Dev are doing non-agile releases on an 18-month cycle, Ops have a certain set of assumptions about what a release represents for them. Doing these sorts of monolithic releases is a major pain for Ops for a while, but there will be plenty of time to get ready for it, and other required activities can be scheduled around that release.

    One of those important dependencies is preparing the monitoring and management of the code that is being deployed. What needs to be instrumented, where do those feeds need to go, what needs to be in place to make sense of those feeds when they arrive, who needs to jump when one of the feeds goes red, and so on. There is a lot going on in the NOC that Devs are not always aware of.

    If Devs suddenly show up with a more Agile cadence of a release every couple of weeks, Ops are simply not going to be able to adapt their existing tools and process on the fly to that new cadence. When you have months of lead time, it’s feasible to write and modify extensive sets of rules and filters to make sense of monitoring data, filter out the cruft, and route the remainder correctly. When your lead time on a release is measured in days or hours—not so much.

    Devs should remember that “infrastructure as code” also includes debugging that code. Adopting release automation, containerization or whatever will be the next cool tool will not solve the problem on its own. Bridget Kromhout has a wonderful articulation of this mechanism:

    Containers will not fix your broken culture. Microservices won’t prevent your two-pizza teams from needing to have conversations with one another over that pizza. No amount of industrial-strength job scheduling makes your organization immune to Conway’s Law, which states that “organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

    Leaving aside the communications barriers that all too often still exist between Dev and Ops, one of the constraints that Ops teams have to deal with is that Ops is segmented into many different teams, each of which deals only with one area or one technology. These days, though, problems tend to have symptoms that cross these domain boundaries, and so operations teams have to communicate with each other.

    The historical ways of doing this are not very efficient, relying on ticket ping-pong, escalations, war-rooms and good old blame-storming. What do you think happens if you suddenly accelerate a system like that? The answer is that it just torques itself into scrap.

    Completing the DevOps Culture Shift

    The good news is that others have been where you are now, and there are both tools and techniques that can help you operate what you have developed. In common with the rest of the DevOps movement, it’s as much a cultural shift as a technological one. Ops teams need to start thinking of operations in a new way.

    One aspect of that change is the ongoing shift to immutable architecture, also known as puppies vs. cattle. Another is to enable efficient communication across support domains. Today, like in the parable of the blind men and the elephant, support teams often get hold of different bits of the problem, misidentifying them because they only have partial information, and therefore cannot truly resolve the problem. Nobody really has a complete view of the whole elephant, except perhaps for some savant who can be reached only after many escalations—and really has better things he or she should be doing.

    If Ops teams can work side by side with Dev, on the other hand, there is a virtuous cycle that becomes possible, with efficient operations removing even more friction from the development process. Communications are the key, whether that means machine-to-machine feeds, human-to-human conversation or machine-to-human interaction. Organizations that get this right reap enormous rewards in both Dev and Ops.

     

    Dominic Wellington serves as Moogsoft’s Chief Evangelist

  • Continuous is the Engine that Drives DevOps

    Continuous is the Engine that Drives DevOps

    It has been stated time and time (and time and time) again that DevOps is primarily a matter of shifting IT culture. The tools and practices that comprise DevOps play a secondary role. But that is only partially true: In reality, the culture shift revolves around continuity, and the applications and tools that fuel continuous delivery drive the DevOps engine.

    I alluded to this point in a post in early 2015. I stated, “Everything is continuous. Continuous development and continuous testing lead to continuous deployment and continuous delivery, which requires continuous support. Continuous monitoring produces continuous integration and continuous change. Continuous security results in continuous incident response … or vice versa. To top it off, all of the continuous activities continuously feed each other to drive more continuousness in some sort of DevOps Mobius strip of continuity.”

    That post last year was a bit tongue in cheek. I have since refined my position, however, and come to the conclusion that the hint of sarcasm was perhaps unwarranted. That continuous continuousness is the crux of the culture shift. It is the thing that separates DevOps from non-DevOps.

    On the Continuous Journey

    Speaking on the topic of continuous security, Andrew Storms, vice president of Security Services at New Context, explains, “Smaller incremental changes are always easier to handle than a large behemoth of a release that can include hundreds of changes. Try finding the single change in a monthly release that resulted in an unexpected security hole in your database configuration vs the release with only two changes that was just developed and released in the last few hours. Security practitioners cannot continue to rely on manual, human-controlled processes to defend against attacks. Automation is a requirement for the next evolutionary phase of security protection.”

    That sentiment extends beyond security to all of IT. When we talk about the culture shift in IT required for DevOps, we are generally talking about breaking down silos and removing the barriers between different teams. The goal of the culture shift is to shed tedious bureaucracy and red tape and empower employees to freely collaborate and cooperate to get things done. In other words, we want to eliminate barriers and roadblocks so productivity can be more continuous.

    Assuming the DevOps transformation begins at that level, it creates an environment of continuous collaboration which becomes continuous development. What follows is a natural evolution of continuity. Continuous development becomes continuous delivery, which requires continuous testing and continuous deployments, followed by continuous monitoring, which provides the metrics and feedback that take you back to the beginning of the loop.

    All of the “continuous” tools and solutions may seem to be part of the technologies and practices that come after the DevOps culture shift, and to some extent, that is true. However, they are also indispensable and inseparable from that DevOps culture shift because without all of the various gears meshing together smoothly—and continuously—what you’re left with is a more traditional approach to IT where everything comes to a halt.

    Is DevOps more of a cultural shift than a collection of tools? Absolutely. That culture shift revolves around continuity, though. Continuousness is the culture shift that drives DevOps.