Can DevOps cure IT's case of Turret Syndrome?

#DevOps

App deployment should be viewed as a comprehensive, end to end process.But we treat it today like each silo is a fork in a project that never merges back together, causing disjointed operations, reporting, measurement and ultimately, failure to meet business priorities of improving time to market, fewer disruptions and lower costs.

Because, silos. Or, as we might call them in the middle ages or the Renaissance, turrets.

Which of the four IT silos does this picture describe?

If you guessed (e) all of the above then you're right. And yes, I'm aware I gave you no choices, it wasn't really a quiz, after all, merely a literary device. I do that sometimes.

All four operational silos in IT are burdened by the same baggage. That's why DevOps ultimately applies to all four ops, because all four ops (storage, compute (aka "operations"), network and security) share the same issues caused by the tendency to create silos (or turrets or towers or whatever you want to call them) as organizations grow. The result is painful for the business, for end-users and for everyone who has to scramble to fix a problem or deal with an outage or figure out the current status (and explain why the app isn't available yet).

Processes ossify and become more complex over time, with no real concern for how they impact the big picture: getting an application to market (whether that market is internal or external is not really important as both productivity and profit are increasingly important to business and thus, the CIO).

So while we can certainly focus DevOps on Dev and Ops, eventually (and by eventually I mean almost immediately) we're going to run into the same issues its trying to solve when we toss the app deployment over the next wall, to the network.

So tear down those walls. Encourage collaboration and shared metrics. Operationalize all the network things and add some Dev to your (Net) ops.

More in this presentation on operationalization: Operationalize all the Network Things!

Published Nov 24, 2014
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