Just Enough Developed Infrastructure

Devops Modelling (Theory, Practice and Caveats)

Here's the abstract of a talk I gave at Yow Conference 2013.

There is no official “devops” Manifesto. I’ve always shied away from writing this for two main reasons:

• not setting things in stone encourages people to keep an open mind. So they can come with their own version of the solution AND the problem. This allows our field to expand and have people re-think and re-evaluate other people’s solutions.
• it often brings a sense of checklist. Do A,B,C and you have reached the final goal. Devops does not have an end-goal, it is continuous journey; whatever you change to improve, will have an impact and might require you re-think your strategy

Therefore I value more the different models people have developed along the years to understand/explain the “devops” problem space:

In the first part of the session, I will iterate over the conceptual models I’ve come across that try to capture the essence of devops. In part two we will leave the theory, and provide a more practical way of obtaining the shared view, using a sort of ‘reverse value stream mapping’ technique. Finally, we’ll take a step back and see how well we’ve done in the past years, explain some of the caveats and look towards the future.

Don’t expect specific tools to be explained in full; We will refer to the tools as examples of concepts though. Come with an open mind and re-think / re-evaluate your “devops” project while applying the principles of the different models.

Synchronized Video on the Yow Conference Site