DevOpsATL Monthly Meetup

Gene Kim (see bottom for bio) will be joining us to give his talk "DevOps Patterns Distilled: Implementing The Needed Practices In Four Practical Steps". Afterwards we hope to have some open discussion about DevOps from the cultural perspective.

MailChimp will be hosting us and providing food+beer for the group.

More about the talk:

One of the valid complaints about DevOps is that it’s difficult to describe what it is. Currently, DevOps is more like a philosophical movement, and not yet a precise collection of practices, descriptive or prescriptive (e.g., CMM-I, ITIL, Agile, etc.). At this early stage we’re in, DevOps is more like a vibrant community of practitioners who are interesting in replicating the performance outcomes and culture as exemplified in the seminal John Allspaw/Tim Hammond 2009 Velocity presentation about doing “ten deploys a day” at Flickr.

The intent behind Gene's work is to catalog what the “high performing DevOps organizations” all have in common, and then provide prescriptive guidance so that other organizations can replicate their results. Very much like the “Visible Ops Handbook,” we are attempting to describe all the necessary and sufficient steps to create the culture, values, processes, procedures and daily work behind their transformations.

We describe what is required from each of the major stakeholders, including Development, Test, Product Management, as well as IT Operations. We will present the common constraints and conditions that apply each of the patterns, as well as the modifications that must be done to existing patterns. Examples include Dev patterns (e.g., Agile and continuous integration and release processes) and IT Operations patterns (e.g., release, change, incident and problem management, monitoring, escalation, escalation of preventive project work, etc.).

By doing this, we hope to significantly increase the probability of DevOps initiatives succeeding, accelerate its adoption curve, and ideally, lower the activation energy required for DevOps transformations to start and finish.

This research is the continuation of the Patrick DeBois’ pioneering work in the DevOps community, as well as John Willis and Gene Kim’s decades long passion for studying and creating high performing IT organizations.

More about Gene Kim:

Gene Kim is a multiple award winning CTO, researcher and author. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He has written three books, including “The Visible Ops Handbook” and “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win." Gene is a huge fan of IT operations, and how it can enable developers to maximize throughput of features from “code complete” to “in production,” without causing chaos and disruption to the IT environment. He has worked with some of the top Internet companies on improving deployment flow and increasing the rigor around IT operational processes. In 2007, ComputerWorld added Gene to the “40 Innovative IT People Under The Age Of 40” list, and was given the Outstanding Alumnus Award by the Department of Computer Sciences at Purdue University for achievement and leadership in the profession.