Slides from a talk I gave at the invitation of a group of local tech recruiters looking for more information on DevOps. My main point to them was that while DevOps has become a label for a common set of system automation tools and processes, DevOps itself is about cooperation between development and operations.

1. DevOps Hiring
Why DevOps isn’t (part of) a Job Title
Ken Sheppardson
Director of DevOps, CrowdFlower
May 16, 2012

2. My Background
1988 B.S.E. Aerospace Engineering University of Michigan
1990 M.S.E. Aerospace Engineering University of Michigan
1992 M.S. Engineering-Economic Systems Stanford University
1990 – 1993 Aerospace/Systems Engineer NASA Langley Research Ctr
1993 – 1995 Consulting Engineer StatDesign / Ford Motor Co.
1995 – 1996 Consulting Services Manager Knowledge Revolution
1996 – 1997 Co-Founder InGenius Technologies
1997 – 1999 Senior Application Engineer NetGravity
1999 – 2000 Operations Mgr/Sr Product Manager Personify
2000 – 2006 Consultant KCS Consulting
2006 – 2008 Senior Data Operations Engineer Jigsaw
2008 – 2011 Independent Consultant
2011 Software/Operations Engineer Change.org
2012 Director of Development Operations CrowdFlower

3. CrowdFlower
• CrowdFlower takes large, information-heavy projects and breaks
them into small tasks that are distributed to millions of contributors
or workers worldwide
• CrowdFlower’s technology platform
– Manages 3+ million global “workforce”
– Controls for quality at massive scale
– Aggregates the verifiable results

4. IBM 704
1954

5. Development Operations
Change Stability
Add New Features Optimize Performance
Deploy Test & Benchmark

6. CompuServe
1977

8. AirBnB

10. The habitat of the System Administrator is shrinking

11. 10+ Deploys per Day
Dev and ops cooperation at Flickr
John Allspaw & Paul Hammond
Velocity 2009
Slides
http://www.slideshare.net/jallspaw/10-deploys-
per-day-dev-and-ops-cooperation-at-flickr
Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT
4

12. Allspaw / Hammond 2009

13. Tools Culture
Automated Infrastructure Respect
Shared Version Control Trust
One Step Build Healthy attitude
about failure
Feature Flags
Avoid blame
Shared Metrics
IRC and IM robots
Allspaw / Hammond 2009

14. June 2009 Velocity 2009
- “DevOps” – Patrick Dubois http://jedi.be
October 2009 Devopsdays – Ghent, Belgium
May 2010 DevOps Café Podcast – Episode 1
http://devopscafe.org/show/2010/5/9/episode-1.html
Damon Edwards & John Willis
November 2010 DevOps Weekly Email Newsletter – Issue 1
http://devopsweekly.com
Gareth Rushgrove

15. The more formal someone’s definition of
DevOps, the more likely they’d like to sell
you something.
(NTTAWWT)

16. John Allspaw
SVP Technical Operations at Etsy
http://www.kitchensoap.com
@allspaw
Web Operations: Keeping the
Data On Time, 2010
The Art of Capacity Planning:
Scaling Web Resources, 2009

17. DevOps is an approach / philosophy
DevOps ≈ Agile ≈ Zen

18. You probably wouldn’t hire…
… a “Zen”
… a “Zen Engineer”
… a “Director of Zen”

19. You should hire…
… Ops who think like Devs
… Devs who think like Ops
… People who have done both

20. “DevOps” job listings tend to be…
70% Web Operations
20% Web Operations + “DevOps” Tools
10% Tools + Process + Philosophy

21. An ideal candidate would be…
Strong enough for either Dev or Ops (pick one)
Not quite strong enough for the other
+
Smart
Cultural Fit
“Easy to work with”

22. Keywords
DevOps github munin
aws graphite nagios
cacti greylog2 OpenStack
capistrano jenkins puppet
chef juju selenium
collectd knife sensu
ganglia logstash vagrant
git mercurial mcollective

23. Nobody has…
3 years DevOps experience
5 years Chef
7 years Amazon EC2
9 year Ruby on Rails
10 years Web Operations
10 year Software Development

24. DevOps Training:
Support
Consulting
Product Management
IT Services Administration

25. Thank You
Ken Sheppardson
ken@crowdflower.com
http://kshep.net
@kshep