Operations is changing, and it is changing fast. Wouldn't it be helpful to be surrounded by peers who are working on the same transformative topics?
Operations is changing, and it is changing fast. Wouldn't it be helpful to be surrounded by peers who are working on the same transformative topics?
In this edition of SRE Anti-Patterns, I'm highlighting the common enterprise problem of disjointed access. Often the people responding to an incident are blocked from taking the required recovery actions even though they have the first-hand knowledge and experience needed to know what to do.
The last mile problem for DevOps is Operations. "The last mile" is an economic concept, born in the telco industry, that describes the last bit of effort that is required to extract the benefit of significant previous investments. The metaphor is a good fit for the relationship between DevOps and Operations.
In this edition of TWL, I'm highlighting a roundtable discussion that Alan Shimel (DevOps.com) moderated at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018. The other participants are John Willis (SJ Technologies), Cornelia Davis (Pivotal), and myself.
The primary topic of discussion is the state of flux in which the operations field finds itself. We considered both the new infrastructure technologies and the new ways of working that are emerging.
IT Operations has always been difficult. There is always too much work to do, not enough time to do it, and frequent interrupts. Moreover, there is the relentless pressure from executives who hold the view that everything takes too long, breaks too often, and costs too much.
In search of improvement, we have repeatedly bet on new tools to improve our work. We’ve cycled through new platforms (e.g., Virtualization, Cloud, Docker, Kubernetes) and new automation (e.g., Puppet, Chef, Ansible). While each comes with its own merits, has the stress and overload on operations fundamentally changed?
Enterprises have also spent the past two decades liberally applying Management frameworks like ITIL and COBIT. Would an average operations engineer say things have gotten better or worse?
In the midst of all of this, there is conventional wisdom that rarely gets questioned.
In this edition of Talks We Like, we are highlighting "A Story of Being On Call" by Charity Majors at Monki Gras 2018. This talk is ostensibly about making on call better. But, it is really about managing systems and human beings smartly and humanely to get the best out of both.