The Agile Executive

Guest co-host Andrew Shafer and Coté talk with John Allspaw (now at etsy) about the dev/ops idea and, more interestingly, cultural and process needs and changes.

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Show Notes

• Check out the video of the Velocity talk we reference frequently. It has some actual meat when it comes to biting off a dev/ops culture, practices, and process.
• John opens up by speaking to tools vs/& culture
• I ask John how his org got over the hump of “we’re a special snow-flake” – resistance to change .
• Effecting cultural change by speaking to problems solved and benefits of the new culture.
• What are some major changes in ops and dev process/culture? Continuous deployment (pushing small changes, often).
• Getting beyond the culture of no – change management tends to be really “no management.”
• You have to have a good track record to do this (MTTR, MTTD) – don’t crash the car. What’s deployment to incident ratio?
• The role of metrics (monitoring) becomes important.
• Physical vs. virtual stuff in operations, EC2 use, etc. People use public cloud stuff for best-of-breed solutions, like SmugMug usage.
• Taking flickr from 25th most popular web property to the 5th.
• Coté is glad John’s at Etsy, cause it fuels the best blog du jour, regretsy.