Recent Readings
Web
Devops Homebrew – Vladimir Vuksan is a regular at the Boston DevOps Meetups and I was happy to see this post on his previous job’s release process. The post is an excellent case study in DevOps in deployment.
An Agile Architectural Epic Kanban System – Part 1 – There’s a lot of room for Kanban and Agile in DevOps initiatives, and I think many people are already headed in that direction (I’ve started doing Kanban with the operations teams at ITA; they’ll be a post on how this is working in a few months). Having the developers and ops people use the same process management technique helps improve communication all around, and Kanban gives excellent visibility into what is happening now in an organization. The article above discusses using Kanban to give visibility into the process of architectural decision making, a process which is often invisible to developers or ops people.
The Visible Ops Handbook – Tom Zauli from rPath brought me a copy of this at the last Boston DevOps Meetup, and I’m about halfway through. I think the practical steps recommended in Visible Ops would be very effective to gain control of an operations organization that is underwater, and after control is regained you can start automating as much as possible.
The Checklist Manifesto – If you haven’t read Complications and Better you should stop reading this and pick up those two books right now. Dr. Gawande’s analytical look at process improvement in medicine (or lack thereof) is readable and it is easy to find parallels between his observations about medicine and any other industry. Both books are highly recommended for people who care about honest self reflection and evolutionary improvement.
The thesis of Dr. Gawande’s new book couldn’t simpler: checklists prevent errors. He backs this up with examples from many fields and the argument really is compelling; I can think of many cases at work where a checklist has saved the day. I think the DevOps trend of automating as much as possible, especially around deployment, is a way of encoding checklists. At ITA our deployment process went from a checklist that took a day or more to complete manually to code that performs the same checklist in under 45 minutes – that’s 45 minutes for an entire airline reservation system.
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