Kief Morris (@kief), a continuous delivery enthusiast and American living in London tweeted the six reasons for ops to love devops. If you’ve missed it, here are his points:

• Reason #1 for ops to love #devops: Smaller releases means lower risk
• Reason #2 for ops to love #devops: Ops involved throughout development means fewer surprises at release time
• Reason #3 for ops to love #devops: Ops involved in dev means apps are well designed and tested for operational use
• Reason #4 for ops to love #devops: Ops involved in dev means infrastructure changes are planned and tested well ahead of release
• Reason #5 for ops to love #devops: Smaller releases mean far less work
• Reason #6 for ops to love #devops: Smaller releases mean problems are much simpler to find and fix, and less painful to roll back (more…)

The folks at the Agile Web Operations blog added another couple of guest posts surrounding Devops.

The State of Devops

Written by James Turnbull, this post takes us back in a time machine to the days where the client-server was a passing fad and serious conversations where held in the car park. Jame’s summarized those conversations with three principles:

1. Think before you act
2. Change one thing at a time, not ten things at once
3. If you fucked up then own up

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From Developer to Devops: What System Administration Skills Should You Know?

With the rising trend of Devops, Steve Jin – the author of VMWare VI and vSphere SDK, got curious about the system administration from a software developer’s perspective. Here you will find Steve’s take on “The Path to Senior Sysadmin” session from the recent LISA 2010 conference.

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Analyst: Rachel Chalmers
Date: 16 Dec 2010

Nolio has released version 3.0 of its Application Service Automation Platform (ASAP), with new measurement, audit and control features designed to elevate the product from automation tool to management suite. A new DevOps Manager exposes useful data to senior executives responsible for the application deployment process. With this dashboard, executives should be able to answer questions like: How long does it take to release an application, on average? How many deployments succeed? How many fail? How long does it take to perform a rollback? Which applications need the most remediation? Which users executed tasks in production? Which users touched a given application?

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Patrick McKenzie, while playing Bingo with Devops, documents his experience and insight while working for a Japanese mega-corporation. Familiar with the too well known bubble gum, duct tape, and praying methodology, Patrick explains that without engineering being an integral part of the organization you will not likely know much about the other side.

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The focus of ITIL Release Management is the protection of the live environment and its services through the use of formal procedures and checks. Working in conjunction with ITIL Change and Configuration Management, Release Management is employed for:

• Large, major or critical Changes
• Bundling or batching related sets of Changes into manageable-sized units

ITIL Release Management’s goal is to protect the live or production environment services through use of formal procedures and checks.

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BMC recently released a white paper with the title the same as this post. It’s always good to read material created and promoted by marketing people ; )  I’ll summarize the main topic for your reading pleasure.

Application release automation will:

• Eliminate configuration-related errors
• Reduce the “time-to-value” from weeks to hours
• Eliminate unaudited manual and script-based processes
• Enable compliance management
• Provide rapid installation and configuration of applications in virtual environments

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At last weeks Gartner’s Data Center conference in Las Vegas, Ronni Colville and Donna Scott presented their view on the DCA – Data Center Automation. While they advocate that DCA is mostly marketing jargon, there are however a few referenceable implementations. Vendors have been slow to deliver the tools needed for DCA, and Ronni and Donna explain what organizations can do to gain benefits and move forward towards the promised vision.

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Day 5 – Why Aren’t You Doing Code Reviews?
Phil Hollenback writes about his ideas on the devops culture providing an overview of the tools used. “However, I do think there are a lot of good ideas to be found in the ‘devops culture’. One idea I particularly like is that sysadmins should think more like developers”

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A nice Ben Rockwood (@benr) article on devops.

Let us first consider “devops”. It is a cultural movement which codifies various characteristics, including the zen like interweaving of development and operations, better integration of “IT” with the business objectives as a whole, infrastructure as code, agile (or lean depending on who you speak with) operations, etc, etc. Alright. As I’ve stated in the past, its all the things ITIL claimed to be but somehow more hip. Alright, capture that in your minds eye and then move it aside.
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