Chapter 1, Section 2. Section 2.

1, "The Convergence, History, and Value of DevOps",

part of the "Introduction to DevOps".
I'm John Willis, @botchagalupe on Twitter.
So, a while back I wrote a blog called "Convergence of DevOps". This is a good
read, I have a link to it.
It covers a lot of what I'm going to cover in this section, so it just might be a
good reference review part to read.
We'll talk about how Lean and Agile, all were a part of the influence of DevOps,
a little bit of the history, as well.
Also, like I said ... told you earlier, I kind of been teasing you that I'm not
going to give you a canonical definition of DevOps but,
but I think it's important to understand some of the leaders in the DevOps movement
and what they've said over the years.
Ben Rockwood works over at Chef now. He used to be over at Joyent, he was one
original Solaris guys.
He says "DevOps is a banner for change", Ben Rockwood at the LISA [Large
Installation System Administration Conference], he has a presentation called
"DevOps Transformation".
Today it's still one of the best presentations - LISA 2012, "DevOps Transformation"
by Ben Rockwood.
Even to this day, it's the best single presentation I've ever seen about DevOps.
We saw Adam's definition.
John Allspaw, we said he is the CTO of Etsy. Etsy is a phenomenal story about, you
know, of a company that just embraces DevOps.
John says "DevOps is what some people are calling the renewed cross-interest in
development and operations collaboration".
Key point: collaboration.
Damon Edwards, again, another definition that I really like. He says "DevOps is
continuously looking for new ways to break down silos, eliminate inefficiencies and
remove the risks that prevent the rapid and reliable delivery of software-based
services.
And Damon has quoted me over time and so I'll throw mine in,
which is "No one can tell you exactly what it is, but you'll know it when you see
it work".
So, in this section I wanted to kind of give you the why/how of DevOps,
and how do we get to DevOps. It's important to understand the history of DevOps,
because then you can
read some of the things and the influences, some of the direct drivers, some of the
indirect influences,
and in the end we'll talk about what some new things that are currently influencing
DevOps over the last few years.
So, again, we'll talk about the direct drivers of ... in this convergence of this
thing we call DevOps and indirect influences.
So, the direct drivers are pretty clear: Open Source, you know, if you look at the
start of the year 2000, early 2000,
we saw that Open Source became pervasive, certainly in all web scale, but even
started to encourage the enterprise.
We saw it in Operating Systems first, and then we saw it in Middleware, things like
MySQL,
RabbitMQ, different Open Source Queue Managers; and then, we started seeing
the enterprise systems management type tools, monitoring tools, things like Nagios,
CFEngine originally, but then Puppet, and then Chef.
Right? And we saw these things kind of really hit and they were driving, and ...
if we think about the people who really started to drive DevOps first, it was
really the what ...
the kind of startup, the web scales.
And the nice thing about these Open Source tools were that a) they were free to
easily access ...
They didn't have to go through procurement and they didn't have to worry about
budget ...
and then, the other equally important, maybe more important, is
they were malleable, because all the source code was there. So, a lot of companies,
early on, were able to take some of the Open Source monitoring configuration
management tools
and really tune it and change it to work for their environment.
I remember one time John Adams was the SRE at Twitter at one point and I was trying
to sell them Chef and he'd always tell people how awesome Chef was,
and I'd asked him one time "John, how come you run Twitter, if you're always saying
Chef is awesome?" and he's like "John,
over the last three years, we've basically made Puppet look like Chef.
Right? So, and today there they both, you know, kind of work the same, but at the
time there was some features and things that Chef did that Puppet didn't.
But, the point was, that these organizations didn't have to go ... currently, they
can move fast,
they can make changes to the software that they didn't have to rely on a vendor
request.
And then you can use delivery ... it was, as part of Open Source, you had things
like Hudson, Jenkins,
just the pipeline in general. You're going from kind of a git, from a source
control, to a Jenkins form of an integration, to some type of deployment tools,
something like a Chef or a Puppet ...
And, so ... and then the indirect influences, we just skipped ... we skipped around
there for a minute
are things like Lean, Agile, and web scale. And we'll deep dive on each of these,
but,
you know, one of the landmark artifacts was a book called "The Machine that Changed
the World" by James Womack
So, James Womack is credited for coining the term Lean or Lean Manufacturing.
As I told you in an early section, there was a bunch of academics ... academia that
were studying why production, right? Toyota Production Systems was doing so well
against the American manufacturers.
And this book was really an explanation, kind of the first explanation of what
Toyota was doing.
So, we'll talk more about the Lean influence and I reference a little bit Mary and
Tom Poppendieck.
I think this is really important we had the Agile movement and some of the Agile
comes from Lean,
some of it just comes from a maturity in software development
and some of the things pre-date the, you know, the Lean's definition, but I think
what's really a milestone here is
Mary and Tom's book, called "Implementing Lean Software Development". This is a
book where they actually
map the Lean concept to Agile software development, and it really influenced the
whole generation of coders.
So, I think the brilliance of mapping Lean, like making that leap from Lean
manufacturing to Lean software development,
and at the same time, just influencing a lot of software developers.
And then, the third piece, which is equally important, was,
all throughout the decade of 2000, you had a lot of these web scale startups that
were
needing to move fast; again, needed the faster-cheaper-safer. And this is a book
that its primary author is John Allspaw, but it's individual chapters.
And in fact, it was probably six months before the word DevOps was coined.
It probably would have been six months later, it would have been called The DevOps
book;
but it has chapters on infrastructure as code, Adam Jacob, Andrew Shafer on Agile
infrastructure,
John Allspaw has a chapter, Eric Ries, Lean Startup, has a chapter on Continuous
Delivery
Patrick Debois has a chapter ... so, there's a wealth of information. It really
helps us understand
how web scale has influenced DevOps.
And then, I told you there was ... that we have ... today we have current
influences.
In this course, we're really not going to spend some time here, but I did want to
kind of set this ... that you know about some of the things that are really
impacting and influencing DevOps today.
Certainly, the Resilience Engineering and Human Factors, we have dr. Dekker, dr.
Sidney Dekker, dr. Cook, Dr. Woods.
These are all people that really were not involved originally in IT,
more involved with things like plane crashes, trying to figure out the human factor
or the resilience opportunities of plane crashes, or
a baby dying in a hospital or some type of a catastrophic event.
a lot of ... a wealth of information there.
John Allspaw, in his blog, "The Kitchen Soap", does a lot of blogging about this.
Dr. Dekker has a fabulous book called "Drift into Failure", but he has a lot of
other
works. Dr. Cook and Dr. Woods ... tremendous ... Dr. Cook and Dr. Woods also speak
at O'Reilly Velocity often.
Another area is Learning Organizations by Peter Senge, kind of the granddaddy with
the "Fifth Discipline".
But Andrew Shafer, who I mentioned earlier, I have a link to the presentation he's
done, called "There Is No Talent Shortage",
a must read for this class.
He talks about Peter Senge, he talks about just learning, and learning
organizations, in general.
And then organizational change management is another area, we're starting to pull
into some of the DevOps enterprise discussion,
John Connor being one of the leading authors there. And also, we're finding that,
in Psychology, a certain burn out
There's Christina Maslach and some of the information about burnout. In fact,
the DevOps Survey actually has a whole section on Christina Maslach's
patterns of burnout and how possibly DevOps, or high-performing, or genitive
culture behavior patterns
we statistically, from the survey, seem to be reducing burnout.