My talk at Agile Venture Vimercate 2019 about dev, ops and devops inspired by the 2001 movie "No man's land"

1. No Man’s Land
La terra di nessuno tra DEV e OPS
8 giugno 2019
DIMITRI FAVRE (I’m not a devops)

2. Inspired by the movie
“No man’s land”
Danis Tanović - 2001

3. Disclaimer
The content of the talk is highly biased,
uninformed, superficial, ignorant, disordered
and incomplete
And probably has more questions than
answers

4. No devs nor ops were harmed
during the preparation of the talk.

5. Several systems and unhappy
customers, unfortunately, have
been

6. A war story freely adapted from several true
and sad stories I witnessed

7. There's always been a nowhere's land
between developers and operations,
surrounded by big walls on the
boundaries, with people at both ends
throwing mud (software and problems)
over the wall and fingering each other.

8. The land of devs
THE NO MAN’S LAND
The land of ops

9. Continuous change
CONFLICTING NEEDS
Stability

12. -I hate Illinois nazis
-I hate sysops more

14. COMMON BEHAVIOR

15. Laziness
COMMON BEHAVIOR
Laziness

16. devops is a mindset, just like agile

17. devops is practices too
Continuous Integration
Continuous Delivery
Continuous Release
Monitoring & Telemetry

18. … and practices means
tools, technologies and frameworks

19. Building software have never been that
simple and complex at the same time

20. And system maintenance is more hard
and complex than ever
(as ops have to relearn how to shell script everything)

21. And even if it wasn’t for new technologies,
even a simple enterprise infrastructure has
so many software and hardware
components that any minor change in the
systems or software can break everything

22. Think of how complex
could be just to right size
the environments (even
on the cloud)

23. Modern development environment pushed
abstraction to details to the highest level…
… and modern
developer barely
know the details
needed to run their
application in the
wild

24. Architectures evolve too
and are getting more and more complex

26. And too many times we forget how
tightly bound software and system
architectures are

27. Till you regret the good old times in
which you had a Monolith

28. Nerd
COMMON BEHAVIOR
Nerd

29. The change speed in the technology arena
is so fast that even fashion brands are
slower than new technology adoption

30. That Ansible’s is so
hot right now
(Ansible va un casino quest’anno)

31. As technicians, we have a compulsory
need to be early adopter of new
technologies, and to switch to the next
evolutionary step of paradigms, tools and
frameworks

32. We are techies-fashion victims
Hunting for the next “Magnum” expression

33. REMEMBER

34. Today’s up-to-date state-of-the-art
technology is tomorrow’s legacy

35. I have some questions

36. How many tools to you use in your
software pipeline?

37. Who and how choose the tools?

38. How many new frictions the tools selection
created between devs and ops?

39. devops is a mindset, just like agile

40. devops is all about infrastructures

41. devops is about creating a frictionless
environment in which digital services
implementation smoothly flow from the
concept to the end user

42. Infrastructures are supposed to speed up
things

43. The devops digital infrastructures speed up
through automation of the core practices

45. devops is a mindset, just like agile

46. devops is a mindset, just like agile
I could also argue, to some extent, that
devops = agile.

47. Still so many companies embraces “devops”
just because it’s cool and trendy

48. without even trying to be agile

49. devops became a buzzword than a mindset

50. Bureaucracy is still there

51. With very complex
release document to
prepare

52. And detailed
processes and tools
instructions to follow

54. “Your honor, the application is correct but the
system has not been configured per
specification”
(but you have no access
to evidences since the
defense has no rights to
check them directly,
therefore you loose the
lawsuit)

56. Mastery

57. Remember that
Stackoverflow is mainly due
to recursion issues in your
code
(though stackoverlow.com
is more than sometimes
helpful in getting out of
mud)

58. Craftmanship

59. Clean Code

60. Logging
Telemetry

61. It’s simply not enough
(and let the no man’s land unoccupied)

62. But companies never left unoccupied
territories.
A UN peaceful corps of devops is there. And
it’s goal is to keep the fighters apart
And making lot of tradeoffs

63. I have a last, major
unanswered question

64. Are we sitting our
shiny new software products
above a mine ready to explode?

66. An example
A brand new large software based on
microservices

67. 1 million $ spent for the
Integration Test Environment

68. 45 days estimated for first setup of the
new environment

69. The Integration Test Environment has
never been turned on

70. WHY? WHAT WENT WRONG?

72. The only compelling reason for devops is to
reduce the transaction cost associated to
release in production (and enable
Continuous Release)

73. The only compelling reason for Continuous
Release is to enable shorter feedback loops
(and it is meaningful only if you collect feedback ad act
consequently)

74. The only way to reduce the transaction cost
associated to release in production is to let
development teams know their target
system and act accordingly

75. And behave as they are the one and only
responsible for the health of the system
(either dev, test or production)

76. Agile development boost end to end feature
development.
That should include having the feature
smoothly running on target systems

77. And the only way to achieve this is to bring
dev and ops in the no man’s land…
together as a DEV + OPS team

78. And let them (not the UN Peace Troops)
build the frictionless infrastructure in which
digital services implementation smoothly
flow from ideas to the end user

79. REMEMBER
I’M NOT A DEVOPS

80. YOU NEITHER
(though you might think so)

81. I am a question to the world
not and answer to be heard
(I’m still here – The Treasure Planet)
So, instead of questions…
I guess you have the answers

82. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimitri-favre-088675/
@DimitriFavre
Dimitri Favre
https://www.inspearit.it