🛰️DevOps

DevOps Management

Definitions

IT - term for the processes and services administered by the information technology (IT) department. As such, IT operations include administrative processes with support for hardware and software.

DevOps - integration of IT operations and software development in one productive unit or department.

DevOps Theory

First Premise. The authors (Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford) argue that traditional project management does not work with IT operations since it cannot alleviate issues that happen between software development and IT operations.

Second Premise. As its name suggests, DevOps integrates IT operations and software development together in a productive unit.

Third Premise. DevOps is based on a “set of techniques” and “cultural norms, processes, and practices.” It is a pragmatic approach to managing IT operations, and under this system, information security, product management, development, IT, etc, can all work together.

Four (4) Types of IT Work

Planned Work (PW)

• Business projects (PW-1) generate revenue or strategic value for the company, e.g. new software/features that add value to customers.

• Internal projects (PW-2) help internal customers in the organization to become more efficient and productive, e.g. maintaining/upgrading existing systems, or adding new security patches.

• Changes (PW-3) are required to stabilize and improve the original output from the 2 categories above, e.g. fixing bugs, updating versions, or refining the features.

Unplanned work (UW)

• firefighting is the most dangerous type of work, because it disrupts, slows or blocks all 3 types of planned work above. Any resource spent on unplanned work (e.g. environment outage or database failure) means that the resource is not being used for other priorities. Firefighting also leaves you with no time/energy for planned work (nor to plan your work). This leads to more problems and more unplanned work in a vicious downward spiral.

Tag for Type of Work

The Theory of Constraints

It isn’t until a manager begins to grasp The Theory of Constraints (TOC) that he begins to point the organization in the right direction. This is because many of the remedial actions his group takes are only temporary — without changing the way that the organization works, the same problems will eventually occur.

The TOC can be broken down as the continual identification and removal of bottlenecks in any given system. To be able to apply this, an understanding of the system itself must be acquired, which means understanding each step in the process. This is deceptively hard because these steps are often hidden in peoples’ heads. Until those steps are listed, understood, and mapped out in a sequence, it’s tough to establish a repeatable process that results in consistency and quality. A practice called value-stream mapping is often the first step in applying the TOC.

DevOps Three Principles

To understanding "the system" in a company, imagine all work, from inception to delivery of the final product, as a series of steps that flows from left to right. This work represents the delivery of any value to customers. The notion of “value” is fluid: it can be an app, a service, a physical product — basically, anything that a customer finds useful. This flow is referred to as the value stream.

The Three Ways (DevOps Three Principles) are a way to approach maximization of value delivery by optimizing the value stream to the customer, gaining faster and deeper insights by putting monitoring mechanisms in place, and by improving and finding new values via experimentation.

The Three Ways capture the overarching philosophy to maximize value from DevOps.

1. The First Way — create a fast and uninterrupted workflow “from development to IT operations to the customer.” Continuously find the bottle-neck, exploit it (maximize the throughput on that bottle neck) and implement ways to improve delivery.

2. The Second Way — establish a “flow of fast feedback,” which allows IT professionals to be proactive and avoid problems by fixing “quality at the source.” Work from strong failure signals to ever-weaker failure signals to get advance warning of quality issues.

3. The Third Way — use the efficiencies gained in The First Way and the safety enforced by The Second Way to introduce rapid experiments that help create qualitative gains. Allow space for “continual experimentation” by promoting a corporate culture of innovation.

The idea is that by following The Three Ways, your company will outpace competitors by orders of magnitude and will win in the marketplace by creating value for customers superior to its competitors.

DevOps first tries to remove bottlenecks before making any improvements. It also uses rapid feedback loops to reduce or even eliminate future production problems. Hence, IT professionals can notice problems quickly and immediately fix them, therefore avoiding disruptions to work.