DevOps, from A to Zen

Are you "doing devops"? what does that mean, anyway? in this no-BS session, we will uncover 26 real world habits of people "doing devops", from the smallest daily action to organization-wide best practices.

first published at Devoxx Morocco, Agadir, 2019

https://devoxx.ma

Transcript

1. DOING DEVOPS FROM A TO ZEN djalal, coach/trainer (@enlamp)
4. one last thing (first) one last thing (first) this is NO authorative content this is NO authorative content just MY 5-year DevOps practice just MY 5-year DevOps practice “YMMV” “YMMV” slides have been reviewed by certified slides have been reviewed by certified trainer trainer no BS, vendor agnostic, buzzword free no BS, vendor agnostic, buzzword free
6. AUTOMATE easy one! more automation = less errors, reproducible workloads your favorite scripting language, can be declarative too!
8. BUILD customer value rst, delivering value to user, building solutions, not only apps pipelines please, with quality gateways
10. COMMIT all the things to keep every piece of code, doc, infra, test, etc. under an auditable system git everything. bonus: take a look at “gitops” set of principles
12. DISCUSS failures embrace failure, discuss fragility, never hide anything under the carpet blameless post- mortems
14. ELIMINATE fragility add con dence in pushing value to production, remove FUD ASAP without hesitation, see something, DO something
16. FAIL and learn best way to learn? at least 15% failure rate scienti c study try and document your ndings, aim for the “root cause”, inject failure (cf. symian army)
18. GROOMING the backlog is your living pet, it must stay up-to-date and healthy planned meetings with stakeholders to align business with work
20. HACK taking shortcuts w/ delivery can make you faster at xing things have a hacking budget, keep quality, never indulge in cowboy mode
22. ITERATE iterations are the agile practice of devops many frameworks, lots of option, pick yours
24. JOIN forces less organization silos 1+1=3 more shared vision get c-level support to push various roles into partners
26. KNOW yourself E cient devops teams involve self-assessment of people and skills. Purpose driven people have better business value. Pass tests, try another role, see if it ts you better
28. LEARN if you stop learning, you actually go backwards take 1h/day to do non- commissioned work
30. MEASURE no monitoring==no feedback can’t take the next step if you can’t see nothing set business KPI, don’t only stare (at dashboards), share alerts (or progress)
32. NEGOTIATE no more top bottom design, negotiation over dummy execution introduce agility by delivering value and then suggesting change (see MEASURE)
34. OPERATE you build it, you run it, and then only you will master it get to really know you env con gs, release process, capacity, etc.
36. PRIORITIZE because important is not urgent. downtime is not bearable! eye candy and new features can wait x bugs ASAP , see Negotiate+Questions
38. QUESTION tasks/priorities as team maturity grows, any member will challenge tasks and priorities. that’s a good sign. no HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) any more give special moments, make o cial room for it. people should feel blameless to ask the W’s
40. RELEASE to production can’t do devops without releases, or else it’s just another local optimization with silos ideally use deployment pipelines, at least stop manually running commands on SSH
42. SHAPE your skills transformation needs people, not the traditional ones. specialists are too deep and narrow (the “I” shape). orgs should shop for “T” shaped people, with broad knowledge mixed with some expertise in a speci c area (think SRE, TDD devs, SecOps)
44. TEST because the usual suspects: bugs, regressions, rotting software as early as possible, automated AMAP , (in production too!)
46. USE we need to USE tools, tech and technics, because we solve problems. not the other way round /!\ question, try and qualify (make or buy?)
48. VOLUNTEER help others in your team, or other teams: invaluable bonds in the long term, especially if not on your payroll agree on inner source principles. like open source, but inside your org.
50. WATCH production part of the devops feedback loop, you run it, you watch it practice observability, or APM
52. XPLAIN why team members should be able to tell why this implementation or this design strategy, how it ts bizops grooming, poker planning, etc.
54. YIELD progress progress is one of major metric in devops practice. ie. more progress=more customer value=more motivation. measure it, share, celebrate, rinse and repeat. watch for the technical debt budget.
57. BONUS 1: top 10 items showing you are “doing devops” 1. Written Business objectives 2. Up to date Backlog 3. “* as Code” git Repositories 4. Documentation for any process 5. Delivery pipelines 6. Automated Tests 7. Peer Reviews 8. Software artefacts 9. Measurement dashboards 10. Blameless post-mortems
58. BONUS 2: List of metrics to measure success Release velocity Mean Time To Repair Versions per pipeline stage Quality and Review Status per Version Active, recent and planned Deployments & Releases Environment Availability & Schedule
59. Thanks! questions & feedback welcome catch me