The sysadvent blog it’s up and running again. In this period of the year you’ll find there 1 great post every day, so keep it in your bookmarks !
This was written by Michael Stahnke last year, but it’s till good to me.
It’s happened. The DevOps term has been picked up by everybody and their brother. From analysts, to marketing firms, to recruiters, the term is everywhere. Beyond it being a very loud echo chamber, it sparks debate. I see tweets and complaints all over the blogosphere about how hiring a ‘DevOps’ team, or being a ‘DevOps’ isn’t the proper adoption of this methodology. That may be true, but arguing about it seems to only be a net-loss from the collective brain-power reading and responding to said internet ramblings rather than solving difficult systems problems.
The push has been largely around culture. DevOps is culture. I’ll agree with that, but it’s not just being rockstar-ninja-superheros operating at web-scale.
I’ll pick up my story in 2007. I had just moved to a new state, new team, new role as a system administrator (mostly doing Unix/Linux). This move was at the exact same company I had worked at since 2002. This move wasn’t a promotion. The Unix team, a seven person team, had had five amazing system admins quit in span of about 60 days. On paper, me taking this job sounded like a horrible idea, so why was it interesting to me? Unlike the rest of $Company, this business unit did things a little bit differently. For some reason, they purchased hardware not on the approved list. They let you run Linux on your desktop. However, the thing that was most interesting to me was the software stack: they ran on Open Source. The most profitable business unit in $Company ran huge amounts of open source software! It was awesome. Rather than drowning in Tivoli, HP, CA and BMC system tools, they had tooling set up with nagios, irc, subversion, cfengine, trac and copious amounts of perl.
This spoke a bit about the culture of the business unit IT department.
