Devops

That's another term for the agile operations concept that has been getting some traction, a concatenation of "development" and "operations" that seeks to close the gaps between the two sides of the IT family by using agile techniques for both. Unfortunately, this only came to my attention after the inaugural Devopsday event last month (perhaps because it was on the other side of the pond, in Ghent). Fortunately, all the presentations from the conference have been made available online, and you can find them here.

The site opens the gates on a wealth of information on real-world implementations of agile techniques in IT operations. Like today's Ward Cunningham webinar, Devops appears to be primarily agile evangelism coming from the development side of the shop and being applied to operations. As such, many of the presentations deal primarily with the relationship between development and operations, which to be sure is a point for improvement in most IT departments, but in fact comprises a relatively minor focus within the ops organization. Nonetheless, it's a start, and perhaps the most realistic sort of start for many organizations, allowing sysadmins and other ops personnel to see and adopt realistic and working agile techniques in an area that is already ripe for the practice.

Even so there are some excellent sysadmin-only presentations mixed in with the bunch showing immediate applications of agile principles to the basic monitoring and support gruntwork that fills the day of most system administrators. Of particular interest in that vein, see Teyo Tyree's "Building Agile Infrastructures with Puppet" which does a great job of laying out some of the current pressures on the IT department whether it uses Puppet or not, and Lindsay Holmwood's "Behavior Driven Monitoring with cucumber-nagios" which comes at the topic of system's monitoring from a new, and more useful, angle that has more customer focus than the simple ping and load tests that are still more commonly applied in many organizations.

I have to thank Patrick Debois of Jedi BVBA for turning me on to this event; his blog can be found here and is also a worthy read for anyone exploring the confluence of development and operations.