This award-winning book provides actionable, real-world guidance on implementing DevOps in large-scale enterprise IT environments, explaining how to achieve high-value innovation and optimization with low cost and risk, and exceed traditional business goals with higher product release efficiency.

The DevOps Adoption Playbook

Preface

RANT OF A DEVELOPMENT MANAGER So, the developer completes writing code for a new service by Monday afternoon. She builds the code, runs unit tests, and delivers the code to the integration stream so it gets included in the continuous integration (CI) build. To get her service tested, before leaving for work, she opens a ticket with the Quality Assurance (QA) team. Tuesday morning, the QA team comes in and sees the ticket assigned to them. A tester gets the ticket and emails the developer asking for the deployment instructions. As there is no deployment automation, the developer responds saying she will deploy the service to the QA environment herself. Tuesday afternoon, they get on a conference call to deploy the code. The developer discovers that test environment is not compatible with her code. They need a new environment. Tuesday evening, the tester opens a ticket with the operations (Ops) team for a new environment, with the new specs. Wednesday morning, the Ops team assigns the ticket to an engineer who looks at the specs and sees a firewall port change. As he leaves for lunch, he opens a ticket with the security team to approve the port change. Wednesday afternoon, the security team assigns the ticket to a security engineer, who approves the change. Wednesday evening, the Ops engineer receives the approval and starts building the new environment. He needs to manually build new Virtual Machines (VMs), with an Operating System (OS), app server, database, and web server. Thursday morning, the server build is done, and the ticket is closed. The tester emails the developer again to deploy the new service. The developer deploys the service, and the tester starts walking through the test scripts, which pass. He now needs to run a regression test but needs additional test data to re-run tests. Thursday afternoon he opens a ticket to request new test data with the production support team. Friday morning, the production support team assigns a database analyst (DBA) to extract test data from production. But now it’s Friday afternoon. Everyone knows DBAs don’t work on Friday afternoons. Monday morning, the tester gets the test data from the DBA. It takes him 20 minutes to run the regression tests and discover a defect. He returns the ticket to the developer—a full week after the code was written and built. A full week of coding has now been done on top of that code, not knowing it was defective. We are now another week behind. What’s scary about this story is that when I tell it to my peers in other companies, they shake their heads not in empathy but in amazement as to how efficient we are compared to them! —Yet another frustrated development manager 

DevOps: An Overview

STUDYING THE FIELD CONDITIONS The sport of cricket is one of the most popular in the world. It is followed by an estimated 2.5 billion people, making it second in terms of fan size only to soccer (football, outside the U.S.). The fan base is spread across the world, with cricket-playing nations extending from New Zealand to Guyana. These are primarily countries that were former British colonies, with the largest base being in India. The popularity of the sport is also growing, with newly minted national cricket teams in Canada, Scotland, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, and Hong Kong. Cricket is played in a field with a central play area called the pitch. The pitch is a prepared strip of compacted soil that is very closely mown—even closer than a golf green. The main play happens on the pitch, where the bowler tries to get the batsman out by bowling the ball using myriad techniques to change how the ball acts when it bounces on the pitch. They may use finger spinning and wrist actions and also take advantage of the prominent seam on the cricket ball. Based on the characteristics of the pitch, their efforts result in variations of bounce, speed, direction, and swing in the air. The ultimate goal of the bowler is to trick the batsman and get him out, while that of the batsman is to predict where the ball will go in order to score runs. Studying the pitch has thus become an art form for players, team management, and, of course, expert commentators. Even before a match begins, the team management and players spend time studying the pitch and analyzing (guessing) the moisture in the soil, the grass on the pitch, the brittleness in the soil, and also the forecasted dew—all of which may change the nature of the pitch for games that are played at night. Before they submit the final roster, they use this information to decide which bowlers to put on the team, based on whose technique would be best suited for those pitch conditions. Cricket is unique in how much a team’s performance can depend on properly studying and assessing the pitch conditions. Barring maybe baseball, almost all other team sports have standard playing fields and surfaces that do not have significant variation between locations or change as the game progresses. Games have been won or lost based on how well a team understood the pitch and prepared for it.

Adopting DevOps

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR THE GROWTH OF MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER If you’re looking for a sporting example of an organization managing fast growth, here’s an unexpected one: Major League Soccer. As soccer’s popularity continues to grow stateside, MLS has added nine new clubs since 2007 (two of which, the most recent additions, will begin play in 2015). Meanwhile, the league’s average attendances now rival those of the National Hockey League and National Basketball Association, and TV ratings—though they dipped in 2013—have significantly grown from a decade ago. This success has translated financially, too; the Columbus Crew sold for more than $60 million—a solid midmarket number that, though it pales in comparison to the valuations for Major League Baseball and National Football League teams, is a record for an MLS club. With 18 seasons now in the books, MLS is on the verge of breaking into the pantheon of America’s major league sports. But it still faces its challenges, from competing with global soccer to growing its core audience. Commissioner Don Garber spoke to Inc. about lessons from the league’s recent growth stage and how it plans to keep it going. With fast growth comes the capacity to run off the rails. To that end, it’s important to keep measure of success—and be quick to diagnose when something might go wrong. MLS keeps tabs of its key performance indicators—which Garber listed as national and local television and media coverage, the development of soccer-specific stadiums, as well as TV ratings and stadium attendance figures. While these indicators are all way up in the last several years, the latter two—ratings and attendance—did dip during the 2013 season. To that end, Garber and MLS were quick to identify the problems for the hiccup: One team performed particularly poorly in terms of attendance, while there is room for improvement in TV broadcasting. The timing on that front is good, as the league’s TV rights are currently on the open market. Garber says that with the reasons for the dips identified, the league still feels confident in its overall plan. The occasional breakage that comes with speed doesn’t mean scrap everything. It means analyze and adjust where needed. “We work to create a plan for the year and then go from the top down, working with the (club) owners to make sure we have the resources to be able to achieve that plan. That approach has worked very well for us over the last number of years,” Garber says. “Now and then you’re going to hit some bumps in the road and you have to be smart, nimble, and focused to adjust your plan to some of the market macro-issues and micro-issues.” —Vaccaro, 2014

Developing a Business Case for a DevOps Transformation

MONEYBALL : OPTIMIZING FOR INNOVATION The 2002 Oakland A’s should have been doomed. The A’s had a $40 million budget to compete not only with the $125 million payroll of the Yankees but against 28 other teams with average payrolls approaching $70 million. As A’s General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) puts it in the movie (and I’m paraphrasing from memory), “There’s rich teams, there’s poor teams, there’s 50 feet of crap, and then there’s us.” It was an unfair game. Beane informed his staff that if they were going to play like the Yankees off the field when finding talent, then they would be losing to them on the field. The only way the A’s could win in a world like this was to innovate by finding new knowledge about how to win. Beane turns to Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), an economics major from Yale who was not entrenched in old-school baseball mentality. (The fictional character Brand is based on Paul DePodesta, a Harvard economics major.) According to Brand, current baseball thinking was medieval; beliefs about player value were shaped by biases that caused players to be misvalued. This market inefficiency would allow the A’s to field a competitive team within their budget by buying wins for less. Using statistical analysis and ideas popularized by sabermetrician Bill James but largely ignored by baseball insiders, the A’s found good players they could afford. They turned to three seemingly flawed players—Scott Hatteberg (bad arm), David Justice (old), and Jeremy Giambi (unathletic with off-field issues)—who had one important skill that the market undervalued: getting on base. The A’s found relief pitcher Chad Bradford, who was unwanted because he threw the ball in an unconventional way and not very fast. But Bradford stopped opposing players from getting on base; it didn’t matter to the A’s how he went about doing it. Many people have criticized Moneyball because of the A’s focus on sabermetrics, which challenges many tenets of baseball’s hallowed conventional wisdom. They argue its focus on numbers dehumanizes the game and ignores the intangibles that only trained scouts can see. Though sabermetrics is an element in the story, it’s not really what Moneyball is about. More broadly, Moneyball is a story of innovating to succeed, or as Beane puts it in the movie, “adapt or die.” Beane was an entrepreneur who was innovating out of necessity. —Bradbury, 2011

Plays for Optimizing the Delivery Pipeline

FEDERER’S NEW SABR MOVE Turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks. This summer, tennis fans were treated to a new maneuver by the 34-year-old tennis legend Roger Federer. It’s called the SABR and features Federer moving way up on an opponent’s second serve to hit a half-volley in an attempt to dictate pace and frustrate opponents. Whenever anyone hears about it, the first question is: What does SABR mean? It’s an acronym: Sneak Attack By Roger Federer used it in his dominating win in Cincinnati and utilized it during his other U.S. Open matches, with the exception of his fourth-round win over the mega-serving John Isner. The move helps him position himself after he hits a deep, chipped return and puts his opponents, like Richard Gasquet, off balance. —Chase, 2015

DevOps Plays for Driving Innovation

BUILDING A CULTURE OF WINNING The prospect of going from a team that’s at the bottom of the standings to one that’s on top is daunting. When you’ve done a lot of losing, it gets hard to imagine yourself winning. So even as I’m confronting players about their weaknesses, I’m also always trying to build a culture of success. That’s not something you can do overnight. You have to go one step at a time, the same way you move the ball down the field, yard by yard. Here’s my philosophy: to win games, you need to believe as a team that you have the ability to win games. That is, confidence is born only of demonstrated ability. This may sound like a catch-22, but it’s important to remember that even small successes can be extremely powerful in helping people believe in themselves. In training camp, therefore, we don’t focus on the ultimate goal—getting to the Super Bowl. We establish a clear set of goals that are within immediate reach: we’re going to be a smart team; we’re going to be a well-conditioned team; we’re going to be a team that plays hard; we’re going to be a team that has pride; we’re going to be a team that wants to win collectively; we’re going to be a team that doesn’t criticize one another. When we start acting in ways that fulfill these goals, I make sure everybody knows it. I accentuate the positive at every possible opportunity, and at the same time I emphasize the next goal that we need to fulfill. If we have a particularly good practice, then I call the team together and say, “We got something done today; we executed real well. I’m very pleased with your work. But here’s what I want to do tomorrow: I want to see flawless special teams work. If you accomplish that, then we’ll be ready for the game on Sunday.” When you set small, visible goals and people achieve them, they start to get it into their heads that they can succeed. They break the habit of losing and begin to get into the habit of winning. It’s extremely satisfying to see that kind of shift take place in the way a team thinks about itself. —Parcells, 2000

Scaling DevOps for the Enterprise

GENERAL MANAGER VERSUS THE COACH The role of general manager in the NFL is perhaps the most vital position of every team. The GM is mostly forgotten on Sundays in favor of the personnel on the field. Our focus falls on players and coaches, but those players and coaches live and die by their GMs. A bad GM will destroy any team. A good GM can bring you a Super Bowl. From 2008–10, Scot McCloughan put aside his search for a second “t” in his name and assembled a roster in San Francisco that would put the 49ers into the NFC Championship in 2011 and the Super Bowl in 2012. He did the same for the Seattle Seahawks from 2010–14. The Seahawks did one better than the 49ers and won the Super Bowl in 2013. —Foss, 2015

Community Questions