Today while I was running I realized I’ve been doing a lot of coding lately. Coding our new infrastructure to be exact. I remembered Kris Buytaert’s talk about DevOps back in February when I was in Antwerp. One of the key statements is that there are ‘sysadmin coders’ and not ‘sysadmins’ and ‘coders’. The only way to achieve great results, is when these two work together and communicate with each other. The idea’s behind this are called DevOps. IT Operations starts using code to manage configurations and infrastructure instead of doing it by hand over and over again. Thanks to CloudStack and Puppet this is now possible. Ideally, you would not have two groups, but one. Stephen Nelson-Smith from jedi.be describes it like this:
So, the Devops movement is characterized by people with a multidisciplinary skill set – people who are comfortable with infrastructure and configuration, but also happy to roll up their sleeves, write tests, debug, and ship features. These are people who making connections, because they can – because they have feet in multiple camps, they can be ambassadors, peace makers, facilitators and communicators. And the point of the movement is to identify these, currently rare, people and encourage them, compare ideas, and start to identify, train, recruit and popularize this way of doing IT.
I didn’t realize back then what this would mean because I was focused on CloudStack and the tools around it. But it is not only about the tools, it’s the way you look at managing infrastructure and development. What we’re doing looks like DevOps but we’re not there yet ;-). In the coming weeks I’ll spend some more time reading about DevOps to see how we can implement this in our organization. Because I really believe this is the way to go..
Remi Bergsma's blog 