[clue] Devops at work?

Fri Nov 13 10:43:21 MST 2015

My corollary to this is that any time you add a tool, it has to replace at
least two old ones.

It's important to manage the simplification though. Like anything, if taken
to an extreme it can be a bad thing. Simple solutions are also by their
nature inflexible. Some OSS wonk said (I'm paraphrasing) "Software can be
thought of like a power tool. The pointy parts are also the parts that do
the work. You can remove those to make them easier or safer, but then you
necessarily make them less useful. I'd rather have a powerful tool and just
accept that if I don't treat it with respect, I may lose a finger." If that
rings a bell for anyone and you happen to know who originally said
(approximately) that, I'd love to be reminded of who it was. I'm sure they
said it better than I did.

I think the hardest part of getting a devops culture established (and
remember, devops is a culture / philosophy, it is not a team, or a product,
or a thing) is to get the priorities and philosophies of the existing
people impedance-matched. Existing ops people tend to be too conservative
or controlling, existing devs tend to be too cowboy, and deciding who is
responsible for what can result in a lot of pissing contests. Getting the
firewalls in the right places and tuned correctly can be tricky,
particularly since the right place will depend largely on the organization
and that the right place today, may not be the right place in six months
since people's attitudes have shifted. Once you get everyone on
more-or-less the same page in that regard, the rest of the pieces tend to
fall into place pretty easily.

Q

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 10:25 AM, David L. Willson <DLWillson at thegeek.nu>
wrote:

> Opinion:
>
> We tend to under-value simplicity. The best corrective is to value speed
> more highly and to realize that speed comes at the cost of avoided and
> sacrificed complexity.
>
> I think simplification happens best as an ongoing practice of reduction.
> Everyone on the team should always be asking, "Do we really need this bit
> here? Is this the best and simplest way to do this, or is it slowing us
> down?" And then fearlessly cutting off and burning any bits that aren't
> paying their way in reward for work invested. Not for nothing did Amazon
> call their conference "re-invent".
>
> The hardest part is throwing away the old, crufty things that one has
> invested in. Maybe it's like cleaning closets, best to do when one is a
> little annoyed, and ready to slash and burn.
>
> You say "barrel of fish-hooks" and I instantly recall a gruesome scene
> from Hell-raiser. Damn, that was a good horror movie.
>
> --
> David L. Willson
> Teacher, Engineer, Evangelist
> RHCE+Satellite CCAH Network+ A+ Linux+ LPIC-1 Ubuntu_CP SUSE_CLA
> Mobile 720-333-LANS(5267)
> http://sofree.us
>
> This is a good time for a r3VOLution.
>
> ------------------------------
>
> I'd be interested too.   Frankly, I'm just coming up on my 5th month in a
> devops job, and I've got allot to learn.   My immediate concern is the
> whole environment feels like an absolute barrel of fishhooks in the sense
> that we have a billion moving dependencies and hardly anyone knows much of
> anything about any of them.    Apparently most of the ideas I've heard
> concerning "innovation"  seem to involve either adding more fishhooks, or
> adding open-source fishhooks.   I'm starting to wonder if maybe the way to
> go is to simplify.
>
> Mike B
>
> On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 11:13 AM, Quentin Hartman <qhartman at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Sorry for the delay, I've been sick for the last several days and
>> ignoring email...
>>
>> I'd be interested if it works in with my schedule. Email me off-list and
>> we can discuss details.
>>
>> QH
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 8:55 PM, Sruthi Annamnidu <
>> sruthi.kumar.a at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Quentin,
>>>
>>>     If you have few minutes, how about presenting a basic talk on DevOps
>>> next month? You do not have to present any slides or anything but just a
>>> quick overview would help. What do you think?
>>>
>>> Thank you,
>>> Sruthi Kumar
>>>
>>> On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 3:54 PM, Quentin Hartman <qhartman at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I don't have time to give a detailed answer now, but I "use devops" at
>>>> work, and it's generally a postiive change. I'll try to respond in more
>>>> detail later...
>>>>
>>>> QH
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 7:14 AM, Charles Burton <
>>>> charles.d.burton at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm starting to push us down that road, which is a fairly interesting
>>>>> transition in research.  It's a slow process, but I'm laying the groundwork
>>>>> for it right now.  For instance I've setup Salt to handle all the steps
>>>>> involved in setting up new systems and built images that people can load on
>>>>> the VM servers that just require setting the hostname and enabling Salt.
>>>>> Then I tied it into Foreman and I've been working on building application
>>>>> profiles so that people just select one from Foreman for whatever work they
>>>>> want to do on their systems.  Next up is building the provisioning, but as
>>>>> our leadership chose Citrix Xen a few years ago it's a bit tricky at the
>>>>> moment.  That and we're dealing with lots of old crufty baggage from years
>>>>> of cowboy ops that I'm still working on cleaning up.  I'm the biggest
>>>>> change agent right now, but there is a lot coming down from above as well.
>>>>> We're NOAA so we're subject to rules from the Government and those have
>>>>> been the stick I've been using to effect change lately.  Basically I got
>>>>> senior management on board, the Federal security  team, and started by
>>>>> offering the carrot of a really good and easy to use platform backed by the
>>>>> stick of if the DHS tells me to shut something off I'll do it immediately.
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Sean LeBlanc <
>>>>> seanleblanc at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Anyone doing devops thing at work? Depending on what that may mean, of
>>>>>> course...there is of course more the mindset and the collaboration and
>>>>>> the processes and politics that may be updated or maybe completely
>>>>>> disrupted (possibly in very good ways), but I'm also interested in
>>>>>> specific technical/engineering practices. (*)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Things like "literate devops", for example:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What about pipelines in Jenkins and tools like
>>>>>> Puppet/Chef/Docker/Vagrant/Ansible/Salt to provision systems and start
>>>>>> incorporating more development practices (such as SCM) within the
>>>>>> wider
>>>>>> IT organization?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> How do you use those things? Have they paid off? Have you been a
>>>>>> "change
>>>>>> agent" pushing these sort of things to make your life better, or has
>>>>>> it
>>>>>> come from an external force (i.e., part of the command-and-control
>>>>>> structure of a corporation) and "devops" means something quite
>>>>>> different
>>>>>> to them?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I ask because I went to Denver BSides last year (and this year) and
>>>>>> they
>>>>>> had a panel of people to talk about DevOps, but not nearly enough time
>>>>>> for all the questions they were getting from the audience. I got only
>>>>>> one question in, and it was just before lunch, so there was a hard
>>>>>> stop.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> (*) For instance, see here: http://theagileadmin.com/what-is-devops/
>>>>>> What "devops" means seems to be a very fluid definition, much like
>>>>>> "Agile" itself. There is definitely both engineering practices as well
>>>>>> as the "what is visible to management, especially non-technical
>>>>>> management" part within "Agile", especially Scrum, and that presents a
>>>>>> very real problem when trying to talk about these subjects.
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> clue mailing list: clue at cluedenver.org
>>>>>> For information, account preferences, or to unsubscribe see:
>>>>>> http://cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> clue mailing list: clue at cluedenver.org
>>>>> For information, account preferences, or to unsubscribe see:
>>>>> http://cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> clue mailing list: clue at cluedenver.org
>>>> For information, account preferences, or to unsubscribe see:
>>>> http://cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> clue mailing list: clue at cluedenver.org
>>> For information, account preferences, or to unsubscribe see:
>>> http://cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> clue mailing list: clue at cluedenver.org
>> For information, account preferences, or to unsubscribe see:
>> http://cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> clue mailing list: clue at cluedenver.org
> For information, account preferences, or to unsubscribe see:
> http://cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> clue mailing list: clue at cluedenver.org
> For information, account preferences, or to unsubscribe see:
> http://cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://cluedenver.org/pipermail/clue/attachments/20151113/9a385d89/attachment.html 