Inspiration
Why write a book about DevOps?
My first computer, a TRS-80
Model I, is in my attic. It has an
external 5-¼ floppy drive and 4k RAM on the main board. I bought the computer,
used, with gift money from my Bar Mitzvah.
I liked to play games on it. Some
were classic adventure games with no graphics at all, just descriptions. “You
are in a room. There are two doors on the east wall. On a table are a book and a knife.” When they
had graphics it was white, low-res pixels on a grey screen. These games were
fun even with the poor graphics. When I wasn’t playing games, I taught myself
BASIC programming. I wrote some small
programs, copied others and tweaked a few.
I had a computer at the beginning of the personal computer
revolution, but I was not consumed with my PC. My interest grew when I got my first exposure
to the Internet in college. I was at the
University of Kansas pursuing a degree in Electrical Engineering. I had done
well in Calculus and EE seemed more practical than a liberal arts degree and
more useful than a business degree. That
was about as much of my future as I could conceive. This was in the late 1980s before the World
Wide Web made the Internet easily accessible.
But the Internet was out there and had been for a few decades already. When
I came upon the Internet, I found troves of interesting reads, elite users and computing
resources on an international network of systems available for anyone that had
the wherewithal to connect to it. And of course—Games! My connection was a
1200-baud modem on a Macintosh Plus, slow even by the standards of the day. The
stream of ASCII characters flowing onto my screen in my dormer in Lawrence,
Kansas at the bottom of The Hill connected me to more people and places than I
could imagine. The Internet continues to
dazzle me.
The Internet has been the engine behind my professional
career. My contributions, as meager as
they are compared to many, including people I am fortunate to call friends and
colleagues, have been the work of my professional life. I began my career in earnest when I returned
to San Francisco from extended travels.
I had been backpacking around the world.
Returning to the States, I was ready to get my career going.
They year was 1995. 1995
has been called “The Year of the Internet” or even more grandiosely, “The Year
the Future Began.”[1] It
was the year the Internet entered mainstream consciousness. The Web exploded over Silicon Valley and sent
shockwaves all around the world. I felt
it in the kiosks set up in malls in Thailand where hawkers shouted, “Go ahead!
Surf the Internet!” I felt it in the breathless articles in newspapers in India
and I felt it in the first Internet café I ever-visited in Jerusalem.
I began to see a way to contribute to the great change the
Web was going to make. In India I picked
up a marketing brochure that helped me put the pieces together.
Published by Sun in the UK, this 32-page booklet was not
your everyday marketing brochure. The
company that embraced “The Network is the Computer” recognized they were
selling umbrellas and it was starting to rain.
They saw themselves moving to the center of the international technology
stage.
“There is no doubt
that network computing and the Internet have changed business as we know it,
delivering flexible and responsive technology.
Our strategy is to help enterprises to capitalize on these
opportunities.”
Martyn Lambert
Marketing Director, Sun UK [2]
Java was marketed as a revolutionary tool for the enterprise
to take advantage of the emerging power and ubiquity of the Internet. Not withstanding Sun’s enthusiasm, their pitch
was sometimes earnest, maybe even self-conscious. Sun entreated:
Note the syntax (This book contains code. You will be asked
to look at syntax again). They printed “Java”
and “Revolution” on different lines, as if they hedged their rhetorical bets and
relied on your imagination to make the connection. It does read differently like this:
Join the Java Revolution
Get started today
Sun did not constrain itself to a technical vision in this
booklet. They included lush full-page
illustrations reminiscent of the drawings of M.C. Escher and the classic Sci-Fi
film, Metropolis.
What was it about Java that had Sun so excited? Here’s a bullet
list of benefits they included:
Table
2: Java Benefits
Java Benefits
|
·
With
Java you can write applications that can run on any computer breaking the
links between application and operating system.
|
·
Java
brings interactive functionality to the Web.
|
·
Java
is an object-oriented programming language.
|
·
Java
allows developers to easily write distributed, robust and secure
applications.
|
·
Java
applications are distributed in byte code format.
|
·
To run
a Java application, a computer needs to run a Java virtual machine program.
|
·
Virtual
machines are available for many different platforms.
|
·
A Java
application could be downloaded from the Internet and transparently executed,
just like a web page.
|
·
Java
applications known as applets can be embedded in web pages.
|
What was crystal clear to me was the benefit that “with Java
you can write applications that can run on any computer breaking the links
between application and operating system.”
Write once, run anywhere! I can write a program once that will run on
anything: a workstation, a phone, a kiosk, or a thermostat. How about a heart
valve regulator? ANYWHERE! Couple the
efficiency of writing the application with the ease of delivering it and we
have the makings of a revolution. A “java
application could be downloaded from the Internet and transparently executed,
just like a web page.” Java: efficient, portable, ubiquitous. Java: cracking open the door to the
future.
Some of these benefits passed over my head. I did not
appreciate the benefit of distributing applications in “byte code format.” And
not all of these benefits were realized with Java. It was not uncommon to hear Sun’s marketing
turned against them. Write once; debug everywhere! became a
well-trodden joke. Nevertheless the impact Java has been making is amongst the
great technology stories of the Internet age.
One of the transcendent benefits of Java was that the
distance between application conception, Dev,
and application delivery, Ops, became
shorter and the terrain easier to traverse.
Typical obstacles for developers: programming for heterogeneous
environments and distributing their programs, were smoothing towards straight
lines. These technology advancements
were nascent DevOps fifteen years
before the word was coined.
Without any particularly clear idea of how it was going to
happen, I determined to link my coach to this locomotive called Java and see
where it would take me. The train station
was in San Francisco. I returned to San
Francisco from my travels and began to pursue a career with Java and the
Internet.
The Internet has not only been a technological marvel of
intellectual fascination; or even my
ticket to a millennial sized pay-off in the Internet boom, but a conduit
for the grandest motivator of all—love.
Before I left on my backpacking journey I had been spending time with a
woman in San Francisco. We’d kept in
touch as well as we could by mail while I was away. We had vague plans to meet in
Morocco where her sister was living.
I was in Jerusalem when we reconnected over the
Internet. I had found an Internet café. It was the first one I’d ever seen. They had two
workstations available. I logged into one of them and started writing an e-mail
to Jill at jilld[ayt]well[dawt]com.
Jill’s email domain, well.com, was the home of an on-line
community called The Well. The Well was
already a famous on-line hangout. It was
one of the many spin-offs of the Whole
Earth ‘Lectronic Link. The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link is most
often remembered when we think of Steve Jobs.
Jobs famously told a Stanford graduating class that he had been inspired
by their catalog. The Well began in 1985. Co-founder, Larry Brilliant a friend of Jobs, showed
the Well to him. Jobs told Brilliant it had the ugliest interface he had ever
seen.[v]
Notwithstanding Jobs withering appraisal of the interface,
The Well incubated extraordinary connections amongst a remarkably diverse group
of users. Writers, artists, musicians and an abundance of technology folks hung out there. They were true early
adopters of Internet technology. The
Well was a paid Internet company and volunteer community long before the
commercialization of the Internet and social media. It continues to operate to this day. In 1995 both
Jill and I were members.
Jill was a conference host and was often on-line. She was on-line when I was sitting in that
Internet café in Jerusalem writing her an e-mail. This café was a primitive setup by today’s
standards. E-mail was not from my own
account, but that of the café’s. The e-mail program inserted a footer with the
café’s land-line phone number. When my message came across Jill’s computer,
never one to sit on her hands, she picked up the phone and called the Internet
café and asked for me, half way around the world--much to the shock of the
barista. On that call, our vague plans
to meet in Morocco became real plans. In
the years ahead, Jill became my partner, wife and the mother of our three sons. As my mom was fond of saying, “When you come
to a fork in the road, take it.”[vi]
Fourk 1: When you come to the fork in the road,
take it!.
This book is about DevOps.
DevOps is making important
contributions to what we think of as the Internet, how it is developed and how
it operates. DevOps is as much as
the transmutation of thought into reality.
Devs conceive of
applications. As they put fingers to
keys, and arrange their thoughts into well-ordered code, there is a sophisticated
conglomeration of process and tools, Ops, that takes that code and delivers it to users wherever and however they need
it.
To do this, DevOps unites
previously poorly aligned concerns Development and Operations. Additionally, DevOps has the potential to provide a
security bulwark against profound and fast moving security threats on the
Internet. DevOps is a phenomenon. As
a phenomenon it is part of a wider transformation that transcends technology
and impacts how we all think, communicate, sense and interact with our
environment.
This transformation is about transcending boundaries heretofore
considered insurmountable; boundaries between the beginning and the being; between
the mind and the body; between concept and reality (think singularity). The convergence between Development and
Operations, DevOps, is a single
example of many convergences emerging in science, business, culture and
politics. Talking
about music, is like dancing about architecture[vii] will no longer be a hallmark of inane comparisons,
but a harbinger of new ways of seeing and doing.
Ok, so maybe that last paragraph or two is bullshit and I
completely went over the top. Of course,
no one actually knows what’s going to happen, or even, what will be important. I
will conclude this introduction by saying; we are living in interesting
times! It has been my great privilege to
work on the Internet during this epoch, and to add my voice to the story of the
information revolution. It is a story that
it still at its beginning. In the here
and now, and in case you somehow missed it, I want to make it abundantly clear:
I am excited about DevOps! Thank you for picking up this book, and
joining me on this journey.
[1]
Campbell, W. Joseph, 1995: The Year the
Future Began. 1995.
[2]
Anon. “Java Essentials: The Internet Springs to Life,” Sun Microsystem
Computers Ltd. Bagshot, Surrey. 1996.
[3]
Anon. “Java Essentials: The Internet Springs to Life,” Sun Microsystem
Computers Ltd. Bagshot, Surrey. 1996.
[4]
Anon. “Java Essentials: The Internet Springs to Life,” Sun Microsystem
Computers Ltd. Bagshot, Surrey. 1996.
[v] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_well.html?pg=4&topic=
[vi]
Many. http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/07/25/fork-road/
[vii]
Many. http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music/
