Death to the DevOps Team! - how to avoid another silo Matthew Skelton, Skelton Thatcher Consulting Ltd. An increasing number of organisations - including many that follow Agile practices - have begun to adopt DevOps as a set of guidelines to help improve the speed and quality of software delivery. However, many of these organisations have created a new 'DevOps team' in order to tackle unfamiliar challenges such as infrastructure automation and automated deployments. Although a dedicated team for infrastructure-as-code can be a useful intermediate step towards greater Dev and Ops collaboration, a long-running 'DevOps team' risks becoming another silo, separating Dev and Ops on a potentially permanent basis. I will share my experiences of working with a variety of large organisations in different sectors (travel, gaming, leisure, finance, technology, and Government), helping them to adopt a DevOps approach whilst avoiding another team silo. We will see examples of activities, approaches, and ideas that have helped organisations to avoid a DevOps team silo, including: - DevOps Topologies: "Venn diagrams for great benefit DevOps strategy" - techniques for choosing tools (without fixating on features) - new flow exercises based on the Ball Point game - recruitment brainstorming - Empathy Snap, a new retrospective exercise well suited to DevOps This session will provide 'food for thought' when adopting and evolving DevOps within your own organisation.

1. Death to the DevOps team! How to avoid another silo
Matthew Skelton, Skelton Thatcher Consulting
Agile Cambridge 2014,
Friday 3rdOctober 2014, Cambridge, UK
#agilecam

2. DevOps
‘DevOps’

3. Team topologies
Flow exercises
Choosing tools
Recruitment
Empathy Snap

4. Matthew Skelton
•Building & operating commercial software systems since 1998
•Cybernetics + Neuroscience + Music
•control engineering
•psychology
•‘network’ and group interactions
@matthewpskelton

5. Skelton Thatcher
Introduction and Services Overview

6. ‘Cloud’ changes the way we mustdesign, deliver, and operateour software systems

7. Changes for ‘cloud’

8. DevOps
‘DevOps’

9. Not DevOps:
“Automation”
“Build & Release”
“Infrastructure Development”
“System Administration”

10. DevOps
“Highly effective, daily collaboration between software developers and IT operations people to produce relevant, working systems” *
*also QA/Testing, IT Service Desk, Programme Management, Commercial, Marketing, etc.

11. Sectors
•Tourism
•Betting
•Travel booking
•Legal software
•Healthcare
•Financial data & reporting
•Government agencies
•Foreign Exchange

12. Organisations
1.Financial data
2.Legal software
3.Travel booking

13. Team topologies
Flow exercises
Choosing tools
Recruitment
Empathy Snap

14. Team Topologies

15. http://bit.ly/DevOpsTopologies

28. HT: @EricMinick, IBM

29. Organisations
1.Financial data
2.Legal software
3.Travel booking

30. 1. Financial data
Goal: shorter Lead Time
No ‘DevOps’ team 
Challenge: define the purpose of the new team(s)
(‘naming things is hard’)

31. 1. Financial data
?

32. 1. Financial data
Are the main challenges technical?
(Clue: probably not)

34. 1. Financial data
Evolve the team(s) over 2 years
Clarity of purpose
Spread culture

35. 2. Legal software
Genuine ‘no Ops’
Challenge: avoid a ‘tooling takeover’

36. 2. Legal software
?
?

37. 2. Legal software
Grow an Operations capability
Use and train the Support team
‘SRE’ or ‘Web Operations’

38. 3. Travel booking
Service Desk silo
Challenge: slow or limited feedback from Production

39. 3. Travel booking
?
?

40. 3. Travel booking
Collaboration with shared tools
Visualise and broadcast
Retain Ops discipline

41. Team topology determines recruitment needs

42. Team Topologies
http://bit.ly/DevOpsTopologies
https://github.com/ SkeltonThatcher/DevOpsTopologies

43. https://twitter.com/EricMinick/status/517335119330172930

44. There is no ‘right’ team topology, but several ‘bad’ topologies for any one organisation

45. Team topologies
Flow exercises
Choosing tools
Recruitment
Empathy Snap

46. Flow Exercises

47. Experience DevOps
A hands-on workshop for DevOps culture
experiencedevops.org

48. @jamesbetteley
@johnC_bristol

54. 2 Dev teams, 1 Ops team 
Ops team did ‘stop the line’ 

56. 2x throughput! 
Service Teams 

57. Modelling teams & constraints
Single team
Two Dev teams, one Ops team
Two service teams (Dev + Ops)
Provisioning delays
Backlog item prioritisation

58. “… organising the North of England’s largest ball flow game”

59. Explore topology effectiveness with different constraints
Drive team topology with metrics from flow exercises!

60. Team topologies
Flow exercises
Choosing tools
Recruitment
Empathy Snap

61. Choosing Tools

66. http://rashidkpc.github.io/Kibana/images/screenshots/searchss.png

68. “How does [the use of] this tool help people to collaborate*?”
* Work together, at the same keyboard/screen

69. ‘How to choose tools for DevOps and Continuous Delivery’
http://bit.ly/ChooseDevOpsTools
‘DZoneguide to Continuous Delivery 2014’
http://bit.ly/DZoneCDreport

70. How to choose tools for DevOps
Value collaboration aspects
Avoid a learning mountain: evolve tooling
Avoid Production-only tools
Consider Conway’s Law
(this list is incomplete!)

71. Team topologies
Flow exercises
Choosing tools
Recruitment
Empathy Snap

72. Recruitment

73. Don’t hire ‘DevOps’

75. Recruitment suggestions
Site Reliability Engineers (SRE)
Web Operations (‘WebOps’?)
SysAdmin+ Git + TDD (?)

76. Recruitment suggestions
Diplomacy
Facilitating
Evangelising
Mentor
Deep specialism in SAN fabrics

77. Yes, we still need operations
Metrics
Layer 2 / 3 subtleties
Rapid diagnosis
Fault heuristics
Incident response experience
‘Battle-scars’

78. Recruiting for DevOps
Don’t hire ‘DevOps’
Don’t advertise for ‘DevOps Engineer’
Use SRE / WebOps/ TDD
Don’t forget Operations skills!

79. Team topologies
Flow exercises
Choosing tools
Recruitment
Empathy Snap

80. Empathy Snap

82. Empathy Snap
http://bit.ly/EmpathySnap

83. Recapitulation

84. How to avoid another silo

85. Team topologies
There is no ‘right’ topology
Many ‘wrong’ topologies for one organisation
Consider skills, core business, SLAs, …
Evolve the topology over time (2 years)
Communicate the purpose

86. Flow exercises
Adapt to include IT Ops people
Learning through physical interaction
Model and measure flow
Flow exercises help choose a team topology

87. Other things
Consider the collaboration value in all tools
Shared tools for shared responsibilities
Don’t hire ‘DevOps’
Encourage empathy

88. We did not really mention:
Funding: CapExvs OpEx
Bonuses & financial rewards / penalties
Building a culture
Conway’s Law
…

89. Death to the ‘DevOps’ teamLong live the DevOps team

90. Further reading
Build Quality In
buildqualityin.com
Forewords by Dave Farley and Patrick Debois
Discount for #AgileCam!
https://leanpub.com/buildqualityin/c/ AgileCam2014
http://bit.ly/BQI-AgileCam2014
Valid until 10th October 2014

91. Further reading
@annashipman–DevOps @ GDS (Build Quality In)
http://markosrendell.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/calling-devops-teams-an- antipattern-is-an-antipattern/
http://www.slideshare.net/Urbancode/building-a-devops-team-that-isnt-evil/15http://seroter.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/8-characteristics-of-our-devops- organization-2/ http://devops.com/blogs/buzzword-abuse-anatomy-devops-engineer/
Allan Kelly on Conway’s Law: https://vimeo.com/channels/londoncd/85378217

92. Thank you!
http://skeltonthatcher.com/
enquiries@skeltonthatcher.com
@SkeltonThatcher
+44 (0)20 8242 4103