Posts Tagged ‘John Allspaw’
Changing Culture to Enable Devops
InfoQ has posted the video recording of the panel on Cultural Change in Devops from DevOps Day US 2010. Under the skillful moderation of Andrew Shafer, panelists John Allpsaw, Lee Thompson, Lloyd Taylor and I shed light on the fascinating cultural dynamics that devops teams go through. The four of us and Andrew are not necessarily in complete agreement on every point, but we all emphasize one key lesson:
Defining learning and readiness in technical terms is inadequate in the devops context.
Click here for the recording of the panel on Changing Culture to Enable Devops.
dev/ops with John Allspaw – The Agile Executive #08
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.
To listen to this podcast, download the podcast directly, subscribe to the blog/podcast feed in iTunes (or whatever), or click play below to hear it:
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.
Agile Infrastructure
Ten years ago I probably would not have seen any connection between global warming and server design. Today, power considerations prevail in the packaging of servers, particularly those slated for use in large and very large data centers. The dots have been connected to characterize servers in terms of their eco foot print.
In his Agile Austin presentation a couple of days ago, Cote delivered a strong case for connecting the dots of Agile software development with those of Cloud Computing. Software development and IT operations become largely inseparable in cloud environments. In many of these environments, customer feedback is given “real time” and needs to be responded to in an ultra fast manner. Companies that develop fast closed-loop feedback and response systems are likely to have a major competitive advantage. They can make development and investment decisions based on actual user analytics, feature analytics and aggregate analytics instead of speculating what might prove valuable.
While the connection between Agile and Cloud might not be broadly recognized yet, the subject IMHO is of paramount importance. In recognition of this importance, Michael Cote, John Allspaw, Andrew Shafer and I plan to dig into it in a podcast next week. Stay tuned…
The Agile Executive 