From DevOps to Operations Science discusses the transition from traditional IT operations to a DevOps model where development and operations teams work collaboratively. It outlines this transition in three acts: (1) how software became the interface for customer interactions; (2) how DevOps practices like continuous delivery helped businesses adapt by delivering better customer experiences faster; and (3) how successful companies build a culture of empowerment and accountability, treat failures as learning opportunities, and remove barriers to speed through technology and culture.

1. From DevOps to Operations
Science
Christopher Brown, CTO,
Opscode

2. From DevOps to Operations Science
A business transformation in 3 acts…
• Christopher Brown
• Chief Technology Officer
• Twitter: @skeptomai, Email: cb@opscode.com

3. CTO
http://dlutzy.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/velocity-2011-day-1/
3

4. What is Chef?
Chef is an IT automation platform for developers & systems engineers to
continuously define, build, and manage infrastructure.
CHEF USES:
Recipes and
Cookbooks
that describe and deliver code.
Chef enables people to easily build &
manage complex & dynamic applications
at massive scale.
• Model for describing infrastructure
that promotes reuse
• Programmatically provision and
configure
• Reconstruct business from code
repository,
data backup, and bare metal
resources

5. People
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikepd/240903973/

6. Business

7. Technology

8. People
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikepd/240903973/

9. Software Engineering
Systems Adminstrators
DevOps
“Business” People?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timyates/2854357446/sizes/l/

10. Hey Ops! Do I have to fire you?
...the site’s down again

11. “I was hired to roll back code”

12. DevOps is supposed to fix this, right?

13. “Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has
built a health-care system with incentives
that inexorably generate terrible and
perverse results.
Incentives that emphasize health care over
any other aspect of health and well-being.
That emphasize treatment over
prevention.
That disguise true costs.
That favor complexity, and discourage
transparent competition based on price
or quality.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-american-health-care-killed-my-father/307617/

14. Developer
Duck
DevOps Platypus
http://www.flickr.com/photos/baerchen57/5609858075/sizes/l/i
n/pool-809956@N25/
http://www.amamoorlodge.com.au/images/platypus-03-swimming.jpg
Ops
Beaver
http://www.biokids.umich.edu/critters/1995/Castor_canadensis/pictures/

15. How does DevOps help?
“The demographic seems to be experienced, talented 30-something
sysadmin
coders with a clear understanding that writing software is about making
money and shipping product.”
“If you're a developer, go and make friends with your sysadmins.
Don't view them as lower life forms, or as people to lob problems to. ...
If they're using Puppet or Chef, get involved - start contributing to their codebase.”
- Patrick Debois
http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing-anyway/

17. Business

18. The Back Office Becomes The Front Office
“In ten years, I’m certain every COO
worth their salt
will have come from IT. Any COO who doesn’t
intimately understand the IT systems that actually run
the business is just an empty suit, relying on someone else
to do their job.”
Kim, Gene; Behr, Kevin ; Spafford, George (2013-01-10).
The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and
Helping Your Business Win (Kindle Locations 5805-5807). IT
Revolution Press. Kindle Edition.

19. • IT was historically a
source of internal
efficiency
• As more and more
customers prefer digital
consumption, that role
shifts to one that is
increasingly customer
centric – the front of the
business, not the back
– Every technology that
previously impacted only
internal business functions
now directly supports
customer interactions!

20. Software is the interface for consumption
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebatty/467581939/sizes/l/in/photostream/

21. “The goal as a company is to have customer
service that is not just the best, but
legendary.” – Sam Walton (Walmart)
Applications became customer service
vehicles
“If you make customers unhappy in the
physical world, they might each tell 6
friends. If you make customers unhappy on
the Internet, they can each tell 6,000
friends.” – Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com)

22. DevOps
• Is the cultural and professional movement
that grew directly from the collective
experience of the pioneers of this transition
• It’s application to traditional IT is 1:1
• The business adaptations encapsulated in
Devops will eventually be ubiquitous
– ....At least, if you want to be great at the next couple decades of global economic growth

23. Continuous Delivery
• Businesses must deliver
better customer experience as
quickly and safely as possible.
• Safety matters!
• Failure to do so will have
serious impacts on customer
satisfaction and loyalty – just
like it did when Sam Walton
was the Ghengis Kahn of rural
retail.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/huffstutterrobertl/5088855119/lightbox/

24. Every success story
we’ve found shares
some common traits
Every failure
lacks one or
more of them

25. Build a culture of personal empowerment and
accountability
•
Focus on responsibility and accountability,
rather than authority
– Functional teams have responsibility for
design, implementation, and administration
of their products and services – cradle to
grave.
– Architecture, Security, Systems
Administration, and QA become
universal responsibilities, with experts
who set standards and build tools to enable
the business to do the right thing.
– Business leaders set priorities and
direction, and have close communication
loops with teams doing implementation
work.

26. Companies that get this
wrong…
Have a strong reliance on centralized
decision making and environmental
gates.
Cannot ever point at individuals who
are responsible for outcomes
Have few, if any, capable “full stack”
engineers
“Architects” responsible for high level
design, but no real commitment to
implementation

27. Treat failure as a learning
opportunity
“Progress on safety coincides with learning
from failure.
This makes punishment and learning two
mutually exclusive activities
Organizations can either learn from an accident or punish the
individuals involved in it, but hardly do both at the same time. ...
Learning challenges and potentially changes the belief about what
creates safety. Moreover, punishment emphasizes that failures are
deviant, that they do not naturally belong in the organization...”
Sidney W.A. Dekker, Ten Questions about Human Error: A New View of No blame postmortems

28. Become allergic to
things that make you
slow
“The number 1
thing we can’t do is
get in people’s
way.”
Phil Dibowitz, Facebook
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lighttable/4981112645/sizes/o/in/photostream/

29. Re-enforce culture with technology,
and vice versa
“Tooling is culture institutionalized”
- Adam Jacob

30. Still with me?

31. • Christopher Brown
• Chief Technical Officer
• Twitter: @skeptomai, Email: cb@opscode.com