For me, there is nothing more intriguing than combining past and future. In this case, consider a mash-up of Star Trek (the original of course) and the DevOps movement. Having grown-up with the crew of the Starship Enterprise in my living room, I was excited to find a great article on GigaOm by Dave Roberts, that compared Dr. McCoy to a DevOps manager. Hats off to you, Mr. Roberts!
Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy and DevOps 2.0
“Crazy way to travel – spreading a man’s molecules all over the universe.” — Dr. McCoy, Star Trek, the original series, “Obsession“
Dr. McCoy was always one of my favorite Star Trek characters. Among his many endearing quirks was a healthy skepticism of transporter technology. Being a doctor, he understood the complexity of the human body and all its constituent systems. Taking someone apart, molecule by molecule, and then reassembling them somewhere else is fraught with peril.
It’s not enough to get the skeleton and muscles right. You need the heart and lungs to be there, too, in the right places. You need the brain, down to every firing neuron and synapse. And it all has to rematerialize just so for the person to walk away from the experience. Otherwise, McCoy knew, you end up with a mass of vaguely humanoid Jell-O on the transporter room floor. Consequently, I’m certain that McCoy would have made a great DevOps manager.
DevOps is the application transporter.
DevOps is a lot like trying to build and operate a Star Trek transporter. The primary DevOps goal is to create a process and tools that can deconstruct a modern enterprise application on the development side of the universe and transport it over into the operations side of the universe. The application has to remain intact and ready to run when it gets there — reliably and on demand, as required.
As with a transporter, what seems simple on the surface is far easier said than done. When moving an application, like when moving a human, you have to make sure that you get all the pieces and that they arrive on the other side in the right configuration. Forget to move anything or reassemble the components in the wrong orientation and the application won’t function as designed.
DevOps is maturing over time and becoming more reliable, thanks in part to cloud computing. The pairing of the two technologies allows us to better capture the total essence of an application and thus transport it into production with greater reliability.
Why do you think this is the case? Share your thoughts with us below!
Click here to read the complete article on GigaOm and learn why DevOps is becoming increasingly reliable.