DevOps (and Reliam) and Why It Matters

877-8-GO 4 IAM
4 6 4 4 2 6

home > news > blog

Reliam Blog

Internet Application Management

posted by bburton on July 22, 2010 • (0) Comments

You’ve probably heard of this DevOps phrase being bandied about on blogs and on Twitter and you may be wondering what it is all about.

It’s good that you are wondering and important that you learn a little more about DevOps, why it can/will be important to you, and how we at Reliam can potentially help you.

What it is this thing?

Devops is really just a term or label that is meant to be a rallying point around which to center discussion and thinking on a variety of trends (primarily in the Web Operations focus of IT), that have begun to coalesce over the last couple of years. These trends, ideas, and tools have existed in various forms for many years, but the last two or so years have seen a huge coming together of them. To best summarize, I am going have to quote something that John M. Willis published recently:

Culture:

People and process first. If you don’t have culture, all automation attempts will be fruitless.

Automation:

This is one of the places you start once you understand your culture. At this point, the tools can start to stitch together an automation fabric for DevOps. Tools for release management, provisioning, configuration management, systems integration, monitoring and control, and orchestration become important pieces in building a DevOps fabric.

Measurement:

If you can’t measure, you can’t improve. A successful DevOps implementation will measure everything it can as often as it can - performance metrics, process metrics, and even people metrics.

Sharing

Sharing is the loopback in the CAMS cycle. Creating a culture where people share ideas and problems is critical. Another interesting motivation in the DevOps movement is the way sharing DevOps success stories helps others. First, it attracts talent, and second, there is a belief that by exposing ideas you can create a great open feedback that in the end helps them improve.

Why it matters.

DevOps is/will be important because it represents a shift in the way we are thinking about and practicing operations and how we interact with developers - and beyond to other groups within businesses.

DevOps-centric user groups, conferences, and discussions are where you will see the next wave of thoughts, tools, and best practices come out in the coming years, particularly in the web operations/web application space.

Where does Reliam come in?

So where does Reliam fit into all of this?

Firstly, the four “points” maybe you could start calling them “pillars” of DevOps, are at the heart of how Reliam’s operations team (our whole business really), operates on a daily basis. Internet Application Management.

We see this as our culture that we work to create and grow every day. We practice this with our customers and our customers’ developers (often the developers are a third party in our engagements) as every opportunity.

This spans everything from being on early stage technical discussion with our interactive agency customers on how to best architect a new web application, to building automation tools for deploying web applications and for monitoring those applications in production.

This also means that we spend a lot of time keeping up with the latest trends and tools and working on folding those into our tools and practices, so we can pass that on to our customers, who depend on us to be their operations team.

This also means that we are involved in the community. We stay involved by writing blog articles like the one you are reading now, by engaging in discussions on Twitter and mailing lists, by attending and giving talks at local users groups and meetups, attending or following conferences, and by supporting professional organizations such as LOPSA.

So what’s next?

So now you know a little about Devops and where Reliam fits in, so what’s next?

There are many things you could do:

Read

Watch

Listen

Follow

Meet