Main questions during the interview where what the term DevOps means, how it is related to the agile movement, how it is different from classic operations and what are the tools currently available.
One topic during the interview was the agile moving, where the term DevOps emerged from. One major drive in the agile movement was to bring developers closer to people, rather than having them isolated inside the company. Similarly, the DevOps movement intends to bring developers and operations closer, as both departments used to be quite separate. In larger companies, entire DevOps teams are now responsible to link development and operations together (also see previous blog post here).
Software being used by operations or DevOps have been mentioned:
- Etsy
- Stats D
- DataDog
- SNMP
There seems to be a lot of interesting history about operations and it appears that this field of work is still facing similar problems as it used to have in the past. With the ability to monitor all the things simultaneously in real-time, operations is facing classic big data problems, such as volume and/or velocity. Additionally, operations as well as DevOps departments want to be able to act pro-actively, interfere before things breach and provide a non-disruptive service. With the rising amount of data, this desire is challenged by what is often referred to as the "bandwidth problem". Not resolving this problem, will ultimately this hinder scaling. And therefore, better tools will be needed for DevOps departments.
The content and information received during this interview has been of very high value for the research project as the challenges faced by the DevOps sector match entirely with what the "Listening to the Heart of Business" project is trying to solve: Being able to be on top of a large amount of metrics with minimal disturbance of your primary task.
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Below can be find excerpts from the interview that have been found as particularly valuable:
"DevOps introduced a numbers of new tools, processes and operations bringing operations into the twenty-first century"
"[It's about] making sure things are pro-active, not re-active"
"monitor everything"
"People have an expectation now, that things will just work all the time. That means you need to be an top a lot more."
"You need to be able monitor a lot of things at one time with through a limited amount of real estate."
"We can see broad brushes, we can see if something broken or if something stopped, but actually getting this pro-activity of 'is it operating well, how is operating' is difficult, because the bandwidth is lower."
"You might have an ambient display for temperature alarm. (...) You wouldn't have an ambient display for a fire alarm. (...) A fire alarm is designed to disrupt you."
"People don't make enough use of non-disruptive monitoring. That's what pro-activity is about. (...) Pro-activity is the understanding and having the nuance to be able to dig into what's happening before it's a problem and before it's breaching."
"It's also a scaling problem. You suddenly got that need to monitor much more than you're able to perceive. You need to be on top of an awful lot of stuff. And that's when people start to look into different ways of data presentation rather than purely a number. What can we do to help increase that leverage? For large organisations, it's about being able to get that higher bandwidth.""The ingenuity of human brains and look at a problem and find a lateral solution is always going to be involved. What it is is about giving humans better tools."
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