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Cutter The Journal of IT Journal Information Technology Management Vol. 24, No. 8 August 2011 “Some people get stuck on the Devops: A Software Revolution word ‘devops,’ thinking that it’s just about development in the Making? and operations working together. Systems thinking advises us to optimize the At Arm’s Length Arm in Arm whole; therefore devops Automating the delivery process reduces Development and operations often play cats must apply to the whole the time development and operations have and dogs during deployment. To stop the organization, not only the to spend together. This means that when fighting, we must bring them closer together dev and ops must interact, they can focus so they will start collaborating again. part between development on the issues that really matter. and operations.” — Patrick Debois, Opening Statement Guest Editor by Patrick Debois . 3 Why Enterprises Must Adopt Devops to Enable Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Joanne Molesky . 6 Devops at Advance Internet: How We Got in the Door by Eric Shamow . 13 The Business Case for Devops: A Five-Year Retrospective by Lawrence Fitzpatrick and Michael Dillon . 19 Next-Generation Process Integration: CMMI and ITIL Do Devops by Bill Phifer . .28 Devops: So You Say You Want a Revolution? by Dominica DeGrandis . 34 Cutter IT Journal About Cutter IT Journal Cutter IT Journal® Cutter Business Technology Council: Part of Cutter Consortium’s mission is to Cutter IT Journal subscribers consider the Rob Austin, Ron Blitstein, Christine Davis, Tom DeMarco, Lynne Ellyn, foster debate and dialogue on the business Journal a “consultancy in print” and liken Israel Gat, Tim Lister, Lou Mazzucchelli, technology issues challenging enterprises each month’s issue to the impassioned Ken Orr, and Robert D. Scott today, helping organizations leverage IT for debates they participate in at the end of Editor Emeritus: Ed Yourdon competitive advantage and business success. a day at a conference. Publisher: Karen Fine Coburn Cutter’s philosophy is that most of the issues Group Publisher: Chris Generali that managers face are complex enough to Every facet of IT — application integration, Managing Editor: Karen Pasley merit examination that goes beyond simple security, portfolio management, and testing, Production Editor: Linda M. Dias Client Services: [email protected] pronouncements. Founded in 1987 as to name a few — plays a role in the success American Programmer by Ed Yourdon, or failure of your organization’s IT efforts. Cutter IT Journal® is published 12 times a year by Cutter Information LLC, Cutter IT Journal is one of Cutter’s key Only Cutter IT Journal and Cutter IT Advisor 37 Broadway, Suite 1, Arlington, MA deliver a comprehensive treatment of these venues for debate. 02474-5552, USA (Tel: +1 781 648 critical issues and help you make informed 8700; Fax: +1 781 648 8707; Email: The monthly Cutter IT Journal and its com- decisions about the strategies that can [email protected]; Website: panion Cutter IT Advisor offer a variety of improve IT’s performance. www.cutter.com). Print ISSN: 1522-7383; perspectives on the issues you’re dealing with online/electronic ISSN: 1554-5946. today. Armed with opinion, data, and advice, Cutter IT Journal is unique in that it is written ©2011 by Cutter Information LLC. you’ll be able to make the best decisions, by IT professionals — people like you who All rights reserved. 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Start my print subscription to Cutter IT Journal ($485/year; US $585 outside North America) SUBSCRIBE TODAY Name Title Request Online License Company Address Subscription Rates City State/Province ZIP/Postal Code For subscription rates for online licenses, contact us at [email protected] or Email (Be sure to include for weekly Cutter IT E-Mail Advisor) +1 781 648 8700. Fax to +1 781 648 8707, call +1 781 648 8700, or send email to [email protected]. Mail to Cutter Consortium, 37 Broadway, Suite 1, Arlington, MA 02474-5552, USA. Opening Statement by Patrick Debois, Guest Editor Despite all the great methodologies we have in IT, a lot of its work — not only the initial provisioning of a delivering a project to production still feels like going new machine, but the whole lifecycle. This gave birth to war. Developers are nervous because they have the to the concept of agile infrastructure. pressure of delivering new functionality to the cus- As a response to these two drivers, devops was born. A tomer as fast as possible. On the other side, operations number of people got together and started a grass-roots resists making that change a reality because it knows movement that set out to remove the traditional bound- change is a major cause of outages. So the usual finger- aries between development and operations. Some pointing begins when problems arise: “It’s a develop- consider this picking up where “traditional agile” left ment problem”; “Oh no, it’s an operations problem.” off. After all, software doesn’t bring value unless it is This tragic scene gets repeated over and over again in deployed in production; otherwise, it’s just inventory. many companies, much to the frustration of manage- To tackle the problem, devops encourages cross-silo ment and the business, which is not able to predict collaboration constantly, not only when things fail. releases and deliver business value as expected and required. The problem is further amplified by two industry trends: agile development and large-scale/cloud infra- Like exercise, the more you practice deployment structure. Agile development by its nature embraces to production, the better you will get at it. change and fosters small but frequent deployments to production. This higher frequency puts additional pres- sure on operations, which becomes even more of a bot- tleneck in the delivery process. What is remarkable is Operations becomes a valued member of the traditional that even though agile actively seeks collaboration from agile process with an equal voice. Far too often, SLAs all its stakeholders, most agile projects did not extend negotiated with a customer work counter to the changes themselves toward the operations people. Continuous requested by the same customer. Now both functional integration and the testing department served as the and nonfunctional requirements are evaluated for their traditional buffer between development and operations, business priority. This moves the usual discussion and in that buffer, pressure has also been building up. on priorities back before development starts. As both The second driver, large-scale/cloud infrastructure, development and operations serve the same customer, forced operations to change the way they managed their the needs of both are discussed at the same time. infrastructure. Traditional manual labor didn’t cut it at Once priorities have been determined and work can the scale of thousands of machines. It’s good to want to start, developers pair together with operations people do small increments and frequent changes, but you need to get the job done. This pairing allows for better to have the tools to support that. Virtualization enabled knowledge diffusion across the two traditionally sepa- ops to spin up new environments very quickly, and rate teams. Issues such as stability, monitoring, and cloud made away with the resource problem. The real backup can be addressed immediately instead of being differentiator came from two concepts: configuration afterthoughts, and operations gets a better understand- management and infrastructure as code. The first ing of how the application works before it actually enables you to describe the desired state of an infra- deploys it in production. structure through a domain-specific language, allowing you to both create and manage your infrastructure using When it’s hard, do it more often. Like exercise, the more the same tools. Infrastructure as code is a result of the you practice deployment to production, the better you increase of SaaS and APIs used to handle infrastructure.