Driving Innovation with DevOps – Idexcel DevOps Roundup

1. Driving Innovation with DevOps

DevOps isn’t just about working faster, more effectively, and at a lower cost. A big part DevOps is also about driving business innovation. Sure, DevOps correctly applied is known to cut costs and reduce downtime, but as this Rackspace 2014 survey found, DevOps is also, across many organizations, increasing sales as well as employee and customer engagement.

But DevOps is also enabling organizations to deploy more capabilities more quickly. As the most recent Puppet Labs DevOps report contends, DevOps organizations are deploying updates 30 times more rapidity and with fewer failures. And they’re recovering 168 times faster from failures and have 60 times fewer failures due to code changes. “What we are seeing is the quality and speed has definitely increased. So people are producing changes that are of higher quality and changes that require fewer rollbacks,” said Nigel Kersten, CIO at Puppet Labs. in this interview with Ericka Chickowski. Continue reading…

2. What does #DevOps mean to the roles of Change & Release managers?

One of our team raised this question in our internal #DevOps Slack channel this week and it sparked off an interesting discussion that we thought was worth sharing with a wider audience.

Firstly, let’s start with one of my favourite definitions of DevOps:

“DevOps is just ITIL with 90% of stuff moved to ‘Standard Change’ because we automated the crap out of it” – TheOpsMgr

Now that’s a bit tongue in cheek, obviously, as the scope of DevOps in a CALMS model world is probably wider than just that but it’s not a bad way to start explaining it to someone from a long-term ITIL background. Continue reading…

3. DevOps Isn’t a Job. But It’s Still Important

TRADITIONALLY, COMPANIES HAVE at least two main technical teams. There are the programmers, who code the software that the company sells, or that its employees use internally. And then there are the information technology operations staff, who handle everything from installing network gear to maintaining the servers that run those programmers’ code. The two teams only communicate when it’s time for the operations team to install a new version of the programmers’ software, or when things go wrong.

That’s the way it was at Munder Capital Management when J. Wolfgang Goerlich joined the Midwestern financial services company in 2005. Continue reading…

4. How devops will change the way that you think and work

Devops is exciting for developers, and can also be scary. It will change what you need to know and the skills you need in order to succeed. Doing devops requires that you learn new tools and embrace deep cultural changes to the way that you think and work. You’ll have to adapt to new processes in the shorter term, while also anticipating long-term organizational changes. Adopting devops means you’ll learn to work differently than you have before, alongside other developers and sysadmins who are also making this big shift. Continue reading…

5. A Sneak Peek of DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015

The DevOps Enterprise Summit (#DOES15) will gather the best practitioners, thinkers, and innovators in the DevOps space. Whether you’re well on your way in your own efforts to adopt DevOps practices, or just beginning to wonder whether DevOps isn’t something you should try, this is the event to accelerate your DevOps journey.

On stage will be leaders from Target, Disney, Nationwide, Nordstrom, Capital One, Raytheon Software, CSG, and many other organizations across a variety of sectors. These are individuals working in large-scale, complex environments who have dealt with the same problems you are struggling with now. Some of them are returning from last year to share their progress. Continue reading…