Increasing the speed and efficiency of the application development cycle has been a goal since the first applications were created and deployed. The increased use of combined development and deployment techniques that make up DevOps has made what was often long and frustrating into a more streamlined process. Richard Miller, CTO at Mocavo.com employs DevOps practices and advises a paced approach for organizations implementing the processes for the first time.
According to Miller, "When implementing a structured DevOps environment, CIO's should realize that:
- DevOps is a mindset of continual, methodical investment in systems, not simply a new hire or new configuration management software, and
- At scale, systems have emergent properties to which we should be willing to "listen."
He believes that gaining an understanding of the process and including segments of the operation over time is the right way to start. Miller explains, "To me that's a central point of DevOps: You automate your largest, current pain point or risk point, then iterate. Your DevOps code grows organically. Our first week of Puppet commits includes packages for Nginx, PHP, MySQL, and Memcached because those were core to our application. It wasn't until later that we automated things like operating system installations, software RAID, and cron jobs.
"If I were implementing DevOps practices at a large, existing company, I would still take an organic approach. I would address the largest, current pain points, then iterate. It's unlikely anyone could give me a 6-month roadmap of all the Puppet code I would write. Instead, the day-to-day and week-to-week failures, outages, and operational needs would guide my actions. The result would be a very robust set of DevOps code that is well aligned with the actual needs and risks of the system.
"To get started with DevOps at a practical level, I'd suggest you read up on Puppet, Chef, and Ansible, pick your favorite, and resolve to automate one thing by the end of the day. The act of installing Puppet/Chef/Ansible and automating one thing will start the momentum, which you can build on each day."
For more on DevOps, read our five part series, starting here.
Scott Koegler practiced IT as a CIO for 15 years. He also has more than 20 years experience as a technology journalist covering topics ranging from software and services through business strategy. He has written white papers and directed and published video interviews.
Scott publishes ec-bp.com, a supply chain industry newsletter and has written for publications including Network Computing, Forbes, Internet Evolution, and many others. He also manages and edits SuccessfulBusinessNews.com - a newsletter for small businesses, and NPTechNews.com - a newsletter addressing technology topics geared to nonprofit
