DevOps: A Movement Emerges
Why do entrepreneurs do what they do?
Certainly many reasons, but I think one in particular stands apart: The belief that a problem is worth solving. In my experience, this is the essential motivation and the source of the passion, commitment and sacrifice that makes us half-crazed at times.
But how do you really know a problem is worth solving?
You know when the market begins telling your story—an unaided and authentic discovery of your problem space—and the pattern repeats until it’s a bona fide movement.
rPath has been the fortunate beneficiary of several movements: the rise of virtual appliances; the emergence of virtualization and cloud computing—and the attendant need for automation to deal with scale; and the changing nature of IT budgets and the need for automation in order to scale and “do more with less.”
But, recently, a very focused movement has emerged—a movement that tells our story in a way that is both powerfully clear and directly related to the inspiration behind rPath. It’s a movement focused on the problem we think is worth solving.
The movement is called DevOps, and its mission is exactly the same as our own: To bridge the gap between application development and IT operations. Like us, DevOps envisions a world in which app dev and IT are collaborative, agile and high functioning. Remarkably, reading the DevOps narrative is like looking in a mirror.
In discussing the need for DevOps, Stephen Nelson-Smith (@lordcope) makes some pointed observations:
“Let’s face it—where we are right now sucks. In the IT industry, or perhaps to be more specific, in the software industry, particularly in the web-enabled sphere, there’s a tacit assumption that projects will run late, and when they’re delivered (if they’re ever delivered), they will underperform, and not deliver well against investment. It’s a wonder any of us have a job at all!”
DevOps is a reaction against the dysfunction in most enterprises today: Code is “thrown over the wall” and IT is left to figure out how to construct, provision and maintain resulting systems. Dependencies are poorly documented, systems often fall over at deployment, and change is avoided at all costs.
In the meantime, deadlines are missed, lines of business wait, and blame is assigned:
IT operations: “The application folks handed me a poorly documented pile of goo that has dependencies beyond our supported OS and middleware platforms.”
App dev: “The platform version we built this against supported all of our dependencies. IT never makes us aware of platform changes. It’s their issue.”
DevOps, like rPath, envisions a better future.
It’s a future where agility doesn’t end with application development. It’s a future where applications are rapidly and reliably deployed and simply and cost-effectively maintained. It’s a future where silos separating apps and ops are replaced with shared content and collaborative process that bring these worlds together.
In our view, the DevOps future depends on:
A version-controlled software library—which ensures all system artifacts are well defined, consistently shared, and up to date across the release lifecycle. Development and QA organizations draw from the same platform version, and production groups deploy the exact same version that has been certified by QA.
Deeply modeled systems—where a versioned system manifest describes all of the components, policies and dependencies related to a software system, making it simple to reproduce a system on demand or to introduce change without conflicts.
Automation of manual tasks—taking the manual effort out of processes like dependency discovery and resolution, system construction, provisioning, update and rollback. Automation—not hoards of people—becomes the basis for command and control of high-velocity, conflict-free and massive-scale system administration.
But that’s our view. Consider other DevOps perspectives. Notably:
Damon Edwards and Lee Thompson (@damonedwards): www.dev2ops.org
James Turnbull (@kartar): www.kartar.net
Stephen Nelson-Smith (@LordCope): Agile Sysadmin
The reality is that IT is in crisis. Today’s system administration processes are too slow, costly and cumbersome—particularly as virtualization and cloud drive massive scale. What IT organizations need is what DevOps—and rPath—envisions.
It’s early days for DevOps, but I think it will emerge as one of the more important evolutions for IT. Then again, I’m biased; it’s our movement.
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