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DevOps:  Problem or Dilemma?

By decro03 posted Aug 11, 2014 11:04 AM

  

The definition of a dilemma on dictionary.com is “a situation requiring a choice between equally undesirable alternatives.” Essentially, a situation where compromises need to be made to move forward, not quite as successfully as both sides would like.  The definition of a problem is “an identifiable challenge to which an equally desirable solution can be derived”. Until recently, the competing priorities between Development and Operations teams have been classified as a dilemma.  Let’s dig in:


I spend a lot of my time educating organizations on DevOps and its significance. This topic has been written about, studied and re-written about thousands, if not millions, of times. If there is so much available content, why is it that many organizations still see it as being new? Is this just another industry buzz word for something we have been doing since the beginning of time?  Are Fortune 1000 companies really doing this? Is this only applicable for strictly online companies like Facebook and Etsy? I’m here to tell you it’s real, and Fortune 100, 500 and 1,000 companies are using it. Why? Why all of a sudden is the infusion between Development and Operations so important? 

Both Development and Operations teams have invested significant dollars in technologies and strategies to make themselves more efficient. On the Development side, we have things like Agile Development, Test Automation and Service-Oriented Architectures. On the Operations side, there are tools such as Automated build processes, Configuration Management and Auto Server Provisioning. Despite these capabilities, organizations are not moving forward. Often, individual teams work more quickly, yet the time to market remains the same. The culprit? Competing priorities and a lack of trust.


Development’s main goal is to churn out as many business requirements as quickly as possible to stay ahead of competition. Operations main goal is to keep a stable Production environment. As applications have become more and more complex, we have seen the inverse with quality. Development is pressed to move faster, QA cycles are riddled with defects and compressed schedules. Result? Operations bears the brunt of these problems, as they are typically graded on their ability to keep a stable operating environment. New and updated applications are deployed to production, and they fail. Operations typically deploys these changes over long weekends, so getting the right folks involved quickly is not only a major challenge, it also costs them time on their weekends. So the calluses that the Operations teams have built up over the years have taught them that deploying changes into production is bad, hence they challenge every change going to production.

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  Therein lies a conundrum: The business wants more functionality faster and a stable production environment. Yet the reality is, more functionality in the timelines the business wants often impacts the stability of the production environment. Dilemma or problem? The emergence of DevOps strategies allows us to classify this as a problem—one that can be resolved without compromising the objectives of Developments or Operation. In my next blog, I will discuss how to bring Development and Operations together to solve this problem.

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