Chapter 1: What DevOps Means (Part 1 of 6)
For the last few years I am being stalked on the Internet. A
lot of companies have paid to target their DevOps
ads to me. I see NewRelic ads entreating, “What is DevOps?”[i]
Puppet wants me to participate in their State-of-the-Art DevOps survey. Gartner wants me to know its annual report on DevOps is now available. What is being
built around a word that was only coined a short time ago is remarkable. Yet,
the word itself, DevOps, has defied
an easy definition. Years into the DevOps
phenomenon what DevOps means
continues to be contested.
So what does DevOps
mean? Let’s begin before the beginning and take a closer look at the words
themselves. Looking back at the etymology of words is a good way to see where
this mash up of ideas called DevOps is
headed.
Develop
Develop, the root of the word development, is a lush word.
It has lovely variations and often connotes magic. Magic that is concerned with
conjuring, making something out of nothing, like “conjuring a table and chairs
out of thin air.”
Many other connotations that are not directly referring to
magic suggest a mysterious process. It is what is conceived of in the mind and
made real. We expect to cause good outcomes, and love the rewards. It is a
process and it takes time, but we are undeterred. Develop is suffused with hope
and expectation. What we make in the process of development is exciting! We want the negative made visible. We want to
produce solutions, to move forward, to learn and grow. We want to develop!
Figure 6: http://www.wordle.net
Operations
Operations is not as popular a word as Develop. It is used
about a fifth as often.[iii] Its use in business and particularly Internet
Operations are new usages. Theses usages are often unfamiliar to people outside
the day-to-day workings of the Internet.
Figure 7: http://www.wordle.net
Merriam-Webster dictionary definition:[v]
It’s most common uses have to do with surgery and machinery.
Operate is often about the body. Surgeons operate on bodies. Surgeons wage life
and death battles in the body against disease and injury. Operations is
concerned with the functioning of systems; their health and well-being; their
availability and performance. Surgeons operate on orga machines. Operations works on mecha machines. A transcendent concept amongst all the variations
of operate is the notion that things need attention and care. They need
maintaining to insure their proper functioning.
So now we have these two words, Develop and Operations. They
have been mashed together into the neologism DevOps, but what does DevOps
mean? It means Dev and Ops are two aspects of the same process. They are co-dependent. One
does not exist without the other. The development of new software depends on
the ability to operate it. Metaphysically (yes, I am going there), if the mind
is the seed of the body and the body is the seed of the mind, then Dev is the mind and Ops is the body. Without the mind the body is not animated. Without
the body, the mind does not exist.
I experienced DevOps
as an epiphany and conceive of it with more than a little bit of grandeur. My
experience is not unique. Many IT professionals have simultaneously experienced
this epiphany. This shared experience is the locomotion of the DevOps phenomenon. Of course, it’s a
big IT world out there, and when many IT veterans were introduced to DevOps they saw just another new
buzzword. Their introduction to DevOps
might have been more marketing than thought. They see lots of hype for a
re-packaging of how things have always been done. There has been a lot of DevOps hype. Marketers as they are want
to do, have often slapped a DevOps label
where it doesn’t fit or even make sense.
Every reaction has a re-reaction and DevOps pendants have taken great offense at how DevOps has sometimes been marketed.
They take particular offense when DevOps
is used as a job title or a department name. They want to protect the idea that
DevOps is a new way of doing things.
You can’t “buy” a DevOps. They want to protect the DevOps phenomenon. They are
overreacting. Even amongst the naysayers there is a grudging admission that the
DevOps wave is so wide and large
that it will not be stopped.[vi]
DevOps is a new
word for a new way of ordering thoughts and actions. It is expressed most
prominently in five primary categories:
1.
Culture
2.
Automation
3.
Monitoring
4.
Communication
5.
Security
