Marriage Counseling and DevOps
I am a DevOps evangelist. I help teams understand how and why they are making mistakes. In practice, this means that I am often listening to the issues faced by developers one day and then learning the flip side from the operations team the next day. There are times when I feel very much like a marriage counselor, trying to help each partner identify what he or she needs to do in order to improve their relationship.
Recently, I had the amazing experience of teaching DevOps, continuous delivery, and configuration management best practices to a large group of very smart folks. We then had one-on-one sessions and a really great discussion about DevOps. Hearing the concerns of attendees really helped me focus on the most common challenges faced by teams trying to address DevOps.
The biggest problem I see is that some organizations suffer from a very dysfunctional siloed culture, where different units operate as if they are completely separate fiefdoms. This behavior is most often seen in large IT operations where each group is responsible for one specific function, and consequently, they do not have a complete holistic systems view, which is essential for effective DevOps.
When a team takes the view that their function works fine, the ensuing frustration is felt by all who know that the system does not work and they cannot find anyone to help them. In practice, some IT operations folks actually lecture the person bringing the problem to their attention. This blame-the-victim approach is obviously not at all helpful.
You may also hear some IT operations hiding behind the claim that the information security group forbids one approach or another. The end result is a scenario where the IT organization, while having many resources, actually does little to understand and resolve problems. You may even hear, “We have never done that before.”
Some operations professionals actually complain that the developers gave them wrong information and the developers just cannot give good estimates. This is often true, because developers are learning new technologies while building the system and discovering new obstacles every day.
Of course, developers have their own complaints about Ops team members—usually in terms of their inability to rapidly address problems and keep up with the pace of change. The truth is that many operations professionals do not have strong enough technical skills, and developers are often justified in this criticism. But it is also true that many developers manufacture these complaints just to have an excuse that operations cannot perform and, consequently, developers should be able to do whatever they want.
If you want to be an effective DevOps evangelist, then be prepared to hear quite a few complaints. DevOps can feel very much like marriage counseling. But the good news is that effective DevOps helps your team collaborate and communicate more effectively, and saving a “family” is certainly worth the effort.
