Devops

In the wake of the recent MongoDB happy hour debacle, there have been a few mentions of DevOps and NoOps. The pieces were mostly about the fact that this incident proved that the IT business is not really in full DevOps mode, not to mention NoOps. I am not confident that NoOps will be the future for a vast majority of shops. Being from the Ops side of things, I am obviously biased toward anyone stating that NoOps is the future. Because that would mean no job left for me and my comrades in arms. But let me explain :) I would like to be a bit more thorough than usual and explain what I see there, in terms of practices and trends. Definitions First let me set the stage and define what I mean by DevOps, and NoOps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps http://www.realgenekim.me/devops-cookbook/ At its most simple definition, DevOps means that Dev teams and Ops team have to cooperate daily to ensure that they both get what they are responsible for : functionalities for Dev, and stability for Ops. A quick reminder though : business is the main driver, above all. This implies that both teams have to work together and define processes and tooling that enables fast and controlled deployment, accurate testing and monitoring. We could go deeper into DevOps, but that is not the point here. Of course, Ops team should learn a thing or two from Scrum or any agile methodology. On the other hand, Dev teams should at least grasp the bare minimum of ITIL or ITSM. What I could imagine in NoOps would be the next steps of DevOps, where the dev team is able to design, deploy and run the application, without the need of an Ops team. I do not feel that realistic for now, but I’ll come back to this point later. How are DevOps, and the cloud, influencing our processes and organizations I have worked in several managed services contexts and environments in my few years of experience, where sometimes Dev and Ops were very close, sometimes completely walled of. The main driver for DevOps, usually linked to cloud technologies adoption, on the Ops side, is automation. Nothing new here, you’ve read about it already. But there are several kinds of automation, and the main ones are automated deployment and automated incident recovery. The second kind has a deep impact, in the long term, on how I’ve seen IT support organization and their processes evolve. Most of the time, when you ask your support desk to handle an incident, they have to follow a written procedure, step by step. The logical progress is to automate these steps, either by scripting them, or using any IT automation tool (Rundeck, Azure Automation, Powershell etc.). You may want to keep the decision to apply the procedure human-based, but it’s not always the case. Many incidents may be resolved automatically by applying directly a correctly written script. If you associate that to the expanding use of PaaS services, which removes most of the monitoring and management tasks, you will get a new trend that has already be partly identified in a study : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/total-economic-impact-of-microsoft-azure-paas/ ...

Almost everyone who has seen the Matrix movie remembers that scene. Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, has just spent the day learning martial arts, by some brain writing sci-fi process. His mentor comes in at the end of one of these “lessons”, Neo opens his eyes and says “I know Kung-Fu”. Of course, learning is not that easy in real life, it takes a certain amount of time, long hours of work and practice. And it probably never ends. Take my current favorite subject, the cloud. To be precise I should say public cloud services on Azure. The scope of what those services cover is extremely wide, and some of them are so specific, they need a specialist to deep dive into. I can be overwhelming. If you work in this field, or a similar one, you may already have had that feeling when you feel you will never get to the bottom of things, when you have the impression that you can never master the domain, because it keeps evolving. To be honest, it is probably true. There are probably thousands of people working to broaden and deepen cloud services every day, and there is, probably, only one of you (or me). For the last 15 months, I have been trying to learn as much as possible about Azure services, in any field possible, from IaaS networking to Machine Learning, from Service Bus Relay to Logic Apps. And after all that time and numerous talks, webcasts, seminars and data camps, I almost always ended up thinking “OK, I think I understand how these services work. I probably could do a demo similar to what I have just watched. But how can I use these in real-life scenario?” And last week, thanks to a very dedicated person, I finally found some insight. Allow me to set the stage. We were invited to an Azure Data Camp by Microsoft. The aim of these 3 days was to teach us as much as possible on Azure Data Services (Cortana Intelligence Suite). The team was amazing, knowledgeable and open, the organization perfect, the attendees very curious and full of questions and scenarios that we could relate to. Overall these 3 days were amazing. However, the technical scope was so wide and deep, that we covered some very complex components in under an hour, which, even with the help of night-time labs, was too fast to process and absorb. It left me with the usual feeling. I probably would be able to talk a bit about these components or areas, but my knowledge felt far for operational, and even business presales level. And I am supposed to be an architect, to have all this knowledge and be able to create and design Azure solutions to solve business needs. So, after two days, that was the stage. Then came in one of the trainers/specialists. I will tell you a bit more about him later on, just do not call him a data scientist. His area of expertise, as far as we are concerned, covers the whole Cortana Suite with an angle that I would qualify as Data Analysis. He had already taken the stage earlier, to explain us what the methodology to handle data was, and how every step related to Cortana Suite services. He even had this speech on multiple occasions. Every time we heard and read it, it made sense, it was useful and relevant. So, Chris started his part by showing us the same diagram, and asking us “Are you comfortable with that?” Followed by a deep, uneasy silence. My own feelings were that I did understand the process, but did not feel able to apply it or even explain it. I see several reasons for that. The first is that data analysis is far from my comfort zone. I am an IT infrastructure guy, I know virtualization, SAN, networking. I have touched Azure PaaS services around these topics, and extended to some IoT matters. The second was that we did not have time to let the acquired knowledge settle and be absorbed that week. Admittedly, I could have spent more hours in the evening rehearsing what we learned during the day, but we were in London, and I couldn’t miss that. And the last is that I feel we are getting so used to having talks and presentations about subjects we just float on the surface of, that we are numb and we do not dive to deeply into those, probably out of fear. Fear of realizing that we are out of our depths. Impostor’s syndrome, anyone? Enter the “I know kung-Fu!” moment. ...