The slides of the talk I presented at devops heroes 2019 in Parma on 26th of October

1. No Man’s Land
La terra di nessuno tra DEV e OPS
26 ottobre 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 sysops more
I hate Illinois nazis

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

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

26. Till you regret the good old ages in which
you had a Monolith

27. Nerd
COMMON BEHAVIOR
Nerd

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

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

30. 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

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

32. REMEMBER

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

34. I have some questions

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

36. Who and how choose the tools?

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

38. devops is a mindset, just like agile

39. devops is all about infrastructures

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

41. Infrastructures are supposed to speed up
things

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

44. devops is a mindset, just like agile

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

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

47. without even trying to be agile

48. devops became a buzzword than a mindset

49. Bureaucracy is still there

50. With very complex
release document to
prepare

51. And detailed
processes and tools
instructions to follow

53. “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)

55. Mastery

56. 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)

57. Craftmanship

58. Clean Code

59. Logging
Telemetry

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

61. 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

62. I have another unanswered question

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

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

66. 1 million $ spent for the
Integration Test Environment

67. 45 days estimated for first setup of the
new environment

68. The Integration Test Environment has
never been turned on

69. WHY? WHAT WENT WRONG?

71. Escape the no man’s land

73. REMEMBER

74. I’M NOT A DEVOPS

75. YOU NEITHER
(though you might think so)

76. Why do we care of devops?

77. Is it because it’s cool (and anyone else is
going devops)?

78. Is it because we need to deploy faster?

79. Is it because it’s a mindset?

80. Is it because devops = agile?

81. Why do I think organizations
should care of devops?

82. What do those objects have in common?

83. Any (kind of) company
is a software company

84. that delivers digital services

85. And digital services are built on top of
software products

86. And to survive and thrive organizations
need to be agile

87. Because we are in a VUCA world

88. To survive we need to able to adapt faster.
And in order to adapt, we need to shorten
the feedback loop

89. There are two compelling reasons for
Continuous Release
1. to enable shorter feedback loops
2. to be able to make experiments

90. devops as we knew so far gave us practices,
tools and technicalities

91. Those practices, tools and technicalities
should become assets of the dev-team

92. Development teams should behave as they
are the one and only responsible for the
health of the system
(either dev, test or production)

93. After all, agile foster end to end
features development
That should include having features
smoothly running on target systems

94. A good starting point is to bring
devs and ops in the no man’s land…
together as a DEVs + OPS team

95. 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

96. … and still not enough

97. Devops requires a joint effort that goes
beyond devs and ops

98. Anyone in the organization should care
about devops

99. As long as anyone in the organization cares
for the products the company makes,
the whole organization is devops
(and agile)

100. devops makes sense if and only if
it is an enabler
to deliver successful
digital services

101. 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

102. My Questions:
• How many tools to you use in your software pipeline?
• Who and how choose the tools?
• How many new frictions the tools selection created
between devs and ops?
• Are we sitting our shiny new software products above
a mine ready to explode?
And in the end, why do you care of devops?

103. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimitri-favre-088675/
@DimitriFavre #noprojects
Dimitri Favre
https://www.inspearit.it
THANK YOU
:) <3