DevOps is about Anti-fragility not only about OPS

The IT-industry always got 1 thing of of 10 and just because they have 1 thing they think they got the point. I saw this with SOA, REST, Agile and now DevOps is happening too.

Yes i will say one more time that the DevOps team is wrong. Is so wrong, is not just a name and is not just a matter of practices.

More and more a see what the it industry got from DevOps is CLOUD and Automation - witch is great because this a very important aspects of devops but however devops is way more than that.

The confusion a SEE is calling OPS -> DevOps, OPS is OPS, OPS is not DevOps. You have Dev in your company a most likely have a ITIL shared OPS in your company so lets say you have 100 developers mostly you have 20 DBAs.

Cloud and Automation => Deploys

Yes Deploys matters but is not only about that. I`m not saying automation is easy in fact is hard and takes lots of time and hard work - thats might be a reason why see so much devops teams or devops people or devops engineers. Because we have a very specialized work to get done around cloud and automation and people(developers) are too busy coding they cant afford stop so what people do? Get a DevOps team to carry all automation and cloud work.

The main problem this is creates is you just created a SILO and now this silo is not called OPS is called DevOps, Whats the difference from this SILO to your old OPS doing shared ITIL and lots of process and slow deploys? Well of course automation and cloud have value but this just means you can do better OPS it does not means you are doing DevOps. When you got specialized - Certifications are the next step and this already start happening.

Better and modern OPS is very important dont get me wrong, we all need Agile Operations and Cloud and Immutable Infrastructure and Discoverability and Centralized Logging and So many other important aspects.

The Issues with SILOs?

SILOs are very anti-lean idea. Often they are full of waste because of each silo has his owen set of priorities and goals not to mention classical lean wastes like hand offs, delays, bottlenecks, motion, extra steps, and so on and on... DevOps should be driven by Lean principles and thats a great reason to not do a silo. The main issues is all companies what benefits but they really dont want to HARD changes well guess what? No Pain No Gain. Our industry is not ready to DevOps. In other hand i dont think we was ready for agile or soa, why it get it all wrong always? Lots of companies are moved by Hypes or gartners charts. Several times this kinda of hype goto a kinda of standard Strategics planing and become a KPI them people need do something. DevOps or Agile or SOA or Scrum should never be Strategic Goals - Make you business better should be a reality to live by everyday. People have the vision that if you put something as an Strategic Goals magic happens actually thats not true - most of times this is like a game and when you have a game cheating is built in feature.

Having a clear and right vision is everything - this is so hard and so few people get it right. That`s why is so hard and that will dont stop until we fix the right root causes deep down to the people who make calls or lead.

DevOps is About Anti-fragility

Whats is anti-fragility ? It is better Software. You start doing all sets of new aspects about your development and operation that you never did it before like:
  * Stress Testing
  * Caos Testing
  * Failure Injection Testing
  * A Service Always can recover from disters
  * Bugs or Failures dont tear down your service - how ever you can degrades the user experience
  * Fall back Mechanisms
  * Proper re-trys and Timeouts
  * Fail over / Dynamic Partitioning
  * Centralized Logging
  * Request control (know what users asked - when and how things blow)
  * Continuous Performance Improvement
  * Incident Training
  * Automated Roll backs
  * Proper Data Management - Automation on DB, CQRS, Compensation, etc...
  * Reactiveness
  * SOA / Microservices right principles and governance
  * Metrics, Scientific Approach to find and improve things
  * Better Data Centers, Internal PaaS and Mesos
  * Awesome Monitoring Proper Postmortems

You only can have that if you dev and ops work together looking for this aspects and Dev needs to know OPS and OPS need to know Dev, they really need to understand the services otherwise you are not doing devops. Easily you could be doing better OPS or modern ops with Automation and Cloud but todo DevOps you need Culture you need a team working together to make sure your software is anti-fragile.

Cheers,
Diego Pacheco



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