DevOps Is More than a Marketing Opportunity
Adam Jacobs made a rather bold claim about DevOps during a presentation at Velocity 2010, saying it is a “cultural and professional movement.” What’s amusing about Adam’s explanation of traditional systems operations is his depiction of administrators as “dudes runnin’ mainframes and dudes installin’ printers,” which are the normal working tasks for any professional working in computer operations and administration for the last twenty-five years.
The difference Adam describes comes down to the new world of web administration—the soon-to-be differentiator between a revolutionary DevOps "cultural movement” and the perfectly content workers in good ol' system operations. The evidence he provides is his own experience of starting out as a website system administrator at the age of fifteen.
Perhaps like me, you might find Adam to be a great presenter with a good sense of humor, but he wasn’t joking about the DevOps “movement” in the presentation at all. I hear two common reactions when I ask people about Adam’s video:
- “A movement? I’ve never heard of a movement called DevOps. Is it like Occupy?”
- “I can’t stand listening to this guy imagine he’s invented something new.”
Then there’s Ben Rockwood’s keynote at the Large Installation System Administration ’11 conference. He states that “DevOps is a journey of discovery, not a destination” and then goes on to quote the poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy by way of Willy Wonka saying, “We are the music makers, the dreamers of dreams.”
In case that didn’t clear it up for you, Ben borrows a model from notable TED presenter Simon Sinek and his Golden Circle by referencing a cognitive model for the mapping of the neocortex and limbic operations of the brain. Ben may indeed be a very smart and popular guy, but his presentation appears to be the result of a lengthy visit to Wikipedia with some Zen-presentation polish.
In my work I meet a lot of people from all divisions, departments, and disciplines in business, technology, and modern-computerized culture. For the most part, I end up falling in with the more practically minded engineers who tend to look at new technology trends and practices with a certain discernment that leans toward what I call solid ground. It has to work, it has to be stable, and it has to be better than the old or current methods. There’s nothing fluffy, ornate, or flashy about this type of IT personality. Messages about DevOps, like those from Adam and Ben, confuse these IT guys because so much of the introduction to DevOps has been exactly that—fluffy, ornate, or flashy.
Surely my intention is not to unfairly criticize Adam or Ben, but I would like to challenge them to get real. Seriously guys, do I need to join a cultural movement just to do my job as a tester working on a company’s website? Is it really necessary to reference a neuroscientist’s brain mapping model to accomplish my everyday tasks? Do we have to constantly place excessive emphasis on words like joy, fun, and awesome? I think most people tune out the DevOps message simply because of this overly flamboyant display of pretense, promotion, and pompousness.
And that’s seriously disappointing, given the promise of the core values espoused by those in the DevOps movement: independence, collaboration, sharing, automation, measurement, and learning. And it’s damaging to the community of IT professionals as well. When those core values are misunderstood and misguided, they can collapse because our stakeholders “just didn’t see the value” of DevOps.
My suggestion is that we spend a little less time hyping the marketing opportunity for DevOps and a lot more time focused on putting the principles to work—every day in our jobs. As for my own writing and curating on TechWell, I want to investigate the pragmatic value of adopting DevOps practices and tactics, and explore the real tangible benefits. Let’s examine the comprehensive outcomes for a team, a department, a company, and a community.
