Year: 2016

Portland 2016 DevOps day – wow, thanks!

Guys, had SUCH a blast last Friday at the DevOps roadshow!

Here’s some pix. I really owe Monu Bambroo, Derrick Cawthorn and the amazing Donovan Brown for coming down and buying out their time to spread awareness of DevOps and the answers we have here at Microsoft for this sea change.

If you’re interested in more, give me a holler. We do have that workshop on “DevOps Fundamentals” that in three days goes through setting up a complete release pipeline – way cool!

 

Some link goodness for you:

  1. Donovan’s site: http://donovanbrown.com/ Search for DevOps. There’s something for everybody at this site. For example, here’s a post describing how he went about setting up a demo for a group in New Zealand using Docker, Ubuntu Linux, Visual Studio, Selenium, etc. Way cool! There’s another good link here for how Deployment Slots play into your DevOps pipeline, another on “how many vendors does it take to implement DevOps?”, triggering a rollback based on user feedback during a release, where Powershell DSC fits in.

 
 

  1. Dave Harrison’s site is here. www.driftboatdave.com. I’ve got some links here on “All Happy Families Are Alike“, “Devopoly“, “Cats and Dogs Living Together“, and “The Five Dysfunctions of DevOps“. These are lengthy but put together will give anyone a good overview of the Phoenix Project and Visible Ops.

 
 

  1. Last, may I recommend Channel 9? Here’s a 12 minute intro with Donovan Brown,  and an excellent three part series on Release Management – Part 1 (overview), Part 2 (RM architecture), and Part 3 (release pipelines). Outstanding, and will give you a nice overview of what we covered during DevOps Day in setting up Continuous Integration and build pipelines.

     

 

 

July 15th Premier Roadshow on DevOps – coming your way!

 

Way cool – at long last, we’re hosting a DevOps half day conference right here in Portland on July 15th!

 

The agenda below is set to change and we have some exciting guest speakers on their way. Get in touch with me and we will add you to the list of invitees!

 

Agenda:

  • Building a 3-Phase roadmap to sanity – and getting out of firefighting
  • Defining DevOps For YOUR Organization
  • Release Management Plain and Simple – Which Tool is Best?
  • Metrics Make It Happen – KPI’s You Can Use to Track Progress and Drive Success
  • Puppet, Chef, Octopus and Visual Studio – Better Together

 

As a movement, DevOps has now replaced Agile as the key factor in getting software builds out the door faster and safer. This workshop will help you define conditions of success for your organization and lay out a practical roadmap to change management. We’ll discuss features and advantages of leading DevOps tools and how to make sure your org culture and people can use these to best advantage to drive value and repeatability.

 

How to Register:

Contact:
Dave Harrison

Microsoft Premier

dharriso@microsoft.com

 

Note: This program is in high demand and registration is on a first-come-first-serve basis. You will be placed on a waitlist if the seminar is full.

Snacks and coffee / tea will be provided.

DevOps Roadshow coming to Portland!

Hey folks, more details coming – but we are going to have a half-day roadshow on DevOps coming to Portland on Friday, July 15th! We’re hoping for a few surprise presenters so the agenda is subject to change – but here’s a sneak peek.

Ping me to get an invite!

As a movement, DevOps has now replaced Agile as the key factor in getting software builds out the door faster and safer. This workshop will help you define conditions of success for your organization and lay out a practical roadmap to change management. We’ll discuss features and advantages of leading DevOps tools and how to make sure your org culture and people can use these to best advantage to drive value and repeatability.

Agenda:

  • Building a 3-Phase roadmap to sanity – and getting out of firefighting
  • Defining DevOps For YOUR Organization
  • Release Management Plain and Simple – Which Tool is Best?
  • Metrics Make It Happen – KPI’s You Can Use to Track Progress and Drive Success
  • Puppet, Chef, Octopus, Release Management and Visual Studio – Better Together

 

When/ Where:

Microsoft Pearl Office, 1414 NW Northrup St, Portland, OR 97209

Friday, July 15th, 9 am-Noon

Ok, we all love DevOps. But now what?

We commonly find that everyone – and I mean EVERYONE – is in favor of DevOps once they realize how great it is. Entire teams read through “Continuous Development” by Jez Humble or “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim and they are full of enthusiasm, ready to change their deployment processes so changes are safer and more repeatable. But then these teams have a “now what?” moment – we know we want to improve our processes, but where to start?

One of the cool things about DevOps is the lack of fuzziness – it is very, very tangible in terms of measuring ROI and tracking progress. For example, check out the very specific metrics you can use below that the thought leaders above have identified as being common traits of highly effective organizations:

  1. High service levels and availability (as measured by Mean Time To Repair – MTTR, Mean Time Between Failures or MTBF)
  2. High throughput of effective change (change success rate >99%)
  3. Tight collaboration between dev, Ops/IT, QA team, and security auditors
  4. Controls are visible, verifiable, regularly reported
  5. Low amount of unplanned work (<5% of time spent firefighting, compared to the average of 40%)
  6. Systems highly automated and hands-free
  7. Server to System Admins ratio 100:1 or greater (average is 15:1)

Those factors above are beautiful because they’re so specific, not subjective. You could – and should – publish these on a dashboard, showing your current state and tracking your maturity level improvement over time.

So, getting down to brass tacks, once we do a baseline and see where we measure up on those 7 key factors above, how do we get to “Phoenix Project” greatness?

You could tackle this in three stages, as follows:

Phase

Steps

Phase 1 – Assessment

Create a release management team

Institute weekly change management meetings

Begin gathering and publishing “7 power metrics” (above)

Inventory applications and systems, and identify business stakeholders

Phase 2 – Enforcement

Identify fragile artifacts (Martin Fowler’s infamous “snowflake servers“)

Document your policy and change window system by system with stakeholders

Remove access to all but authorized change managers

Electrify the fence with monitoring / active enforcement of policy

Phase 3 – Stabilization

Build a library of repeatable builds

Feed change info to first responders and trouble ticket system

Kaizen (improve and expand metrics gathering, feedback to stakeholders and management)

 

These phases aren’t strictly done in a series – there’ll be overlap, and its definitely a monumental undertaking. But, if you love the idea of change management and reducing all the wasted time and stress you spend in firefighting in your company, rest assured – DevOps isn’t just buzz and fluff, it’s tangible and measurable. And it’s a journey that – while it has no true ending – you’ll be very glad that you took. It’ll mean a happier relationship with your business partners and customers, less time tied down in reactive troubleshooting, and more time with your loved ones and families. What’s not to love?

P.S. if you enjoyed The Phoenix Project and want to read up more on your next steps, check out “Visible Ops“. This tiny little book is 100 pages of very specific, tangible steps you can take to inject some DevOps goodness into your own IT organization.