Volume 9 - Number 2 - February 2011
 Many technology organizations struggle to deliver software on a timely basis. This can become a serious problem when Agile development teams try to raise the bar with rapid iterative development. Agile works well in many environments, but some teams struggle when it is time to deliver the application to Production or ship to the client. Devops embodies a set of principles and practices that help improve both the communication and the delivery function itself. This month, the CM Journal gives you a fantastic introduction to these best practices in Devops 101. Bill Portelli, President and CEO of Collabnet gives us four trends that are driving the rise of DevOps. Mike Maciag, CEO of Electric Cloud explains how the Rise of DevOps and the Private Cloud Will Change Development in 2011. Sasha Gilenson, CEO and co-Founder of Evolven Software explains The Crucial Role DevOps Plays in Change & Configuration Management. Steve Berczuk tells us that Agile Teams Care About Devops and Joe Townsend has DevOps 101: The Future of Development, Quality and Operations. Ben Weatherall asks, "What is Devops and Why Do I Care". My colleague, Angela Moore, adds her own Predictions for 2011 and I deliver my view of Devops in Behaviorally Speaking. Please do drop me a line let me know about your own experiences with Devops and watch our Video channel for upcoming interviews with our experts on DevOps 101! Bob Aiello
Editor in Chief
CM Crossroads
raiello@acm.org
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DevOps 101
by Bill Portelli
Simply, “DevOps” is a contraction of “development and quality assurance” and “operations” that describes the practice and result of the bi-directional integration of these functions in an enterprise. It is a set of development, quality assurance, and operational tools and processes aimed at achieving the business goal of deploying timely and higher-quality software products and services.
If you’re using Agile methodologies or running software in the Cloud, it’s inevitable that you’ll someday wrestle with the challenges of DevOps, which offers a collaborative approach to ensure that fast, nimble development teams stay in sync with the operations teams running data centers and deploying applications in the Cloud. When the teams are in sync, developers and quality professionals accelerate the right set of deployment priorities in their design and test practices and operations teams keep the Cloud computing environment predictable, efficient, and controlled.
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How the Rise of DevOps and the Private Cloud Will Change Development in 2011
by Mike Maciag
For years, software development and IT organizations have found themselves at odds, struggling to reconcile competing goals. In the past, technology limitations kept organizations from fully resolving this dilemma, but today, with new cloud computing technologies at our disposal, we are closer than ever to bridging the gap between development and IT. A dedicated development operations team can be the final piece of the puzzle, and I think 2011 will be the year that organizations recognize its value and development operations goes mainstream.
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The Crucial Role DevOps Plays in Change & Configuration Management
by Sasha Gilenson
Today’s competitive landscape has pushed the need to be agile, and accelerated the pace of business system changes, while making the need for control in IT greater than ever. Today’s IT Operations organizations are experiencing anxiety, as they deal with an overwhelming amount of changes being “thrown over the wall” to their counterparts in Development . These changes need to be accepted and deployed, while frequently IT is unaware of the background, content and impact. At the same time Operations introduces changes from their side – on the infrastructure - that can impact the application layer, leaving developers both unaware and not cognizant of the impact these changes have on further development and testing. So, while IT Operations is actually charged with maintaining stability of the working environment, the introduction of any these types of changes creates risk. The emerging DevOps discipline can show its real value in this arena, bringing these two parts of the organization together.
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Agile Teams Care About Dev Ops
by Steve Berczuk
While it’s good that the idea of considering production issues early now has a name (Dev Ops), what matters in the end is delivering software more reliably, reducing waste in the product delivery process, and making stakeholders happy. Since product’s don’t deliver value until they are deployed and working it’s good to take a step back and consider operations and deployment processes and team as first class stakeholders earlier.
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Devops 101: The Future of Development, Quality and Operations
by Joe Townsend
Devops is a movement that is underway or at least in the very early stages of infancy as a way to rid the IT world of some if not most of its silo’s. Silos have existed in Information Technology (IT) from the beginning for two reasons, the complex nature of early IT systems and because that’s the way businesses are run, for the most part. Silo’s are an easy way for Accounting to make sense of business operations, for example, marketing only does marketing activities, sales does sales, distribution does distribution, etc. So fast forward to today’s IT environment where Agile is taking hold and become more prevalent, where IT systems are becoming more complex, where news reaches the rest of the worlds in seconds not days or weeks. Large scale failures and inefficiency is becoming not only way of life, in some people’s eyes it’s the norm in IT. Devops is an attempt to correct this: Will it succeed? Time will tell.
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DevOps
by Ben Weatherall
Devops is hot. Many organizations are working to understand and implement the processes and tools required to streamline delivery from development to operations. What’s new about these practices and why are they important? Devops takes much of its focus from Agile development and has the potential to change the way that technology teams work together in many significant ways. ITIL has also resulted in significant improvements in how IT operations handles release management, service asset and change management (SACM). All of this is good news for development teams who want to rapidly build, package and deploy applications. Read on if you would like to understand how to implement Devops Best Practices.
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CM Trends in 2011
by Angela Moore
At the dawn of a new year, we often take time to reflect on what has occurred in the prior year and to look forward to new opportunities awaiting us. The reflection time should be one of learning from others, situations, and self. The future’s brightness often is in contrast to the past’s darkness. Was there gloom from 2010? Hopefully, your personal answer to my question is, “no”. Even so, we have hopes of a brighter tomorrow. Because we spend a third of our adult life working, we will focus our lens to our profession and its trends. What was the picture of CM in 2010, and where are we headed in 2011?
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Behaviorally Speaking – Devops 101
by Bob Aiello
Devops is hot. Many organizations are working to understand and implement the processes and tools required to streamline delivery from development to operations. What’s new about these practices and why are they important? Devops takes much of its focus from Agile development and has the potential to change the way that technology teams work together in many significant ways. ITIL has also resulted in significant improvements in how IT operations handles release management, service asset and change management (SACM). All of this is good news for development teams who want to rapidly build, package and deploy applications. Read on if you would like to understand how to implement Devops Best Practices.
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