DevOps Enterprise Review #5

What Gene Kim is tweeting, DevOps resources, industry news, & more

#DOES19 London

Published in

IT Revolution

8 min readApr 8, 2019

Hello, DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) Community!

With the fifth edition of the DevOps Enterprise Review, our journey together continues to expand into the world of DevOps and IT in the Enterprise.

If this is your first venture into our bi-monthly periodical, the purpose of this content is to act as a glue that keeps the community connected by reporting on the happenings in, and around, the industry.

This edition of the DevOps Enterprise Review (otherwise known as the “DOER”) features several resources that pinpoint the challenges and opportunities that technology leaders face on a daily basis. From nurturing the cultivation of “thinking environments” to learning how one of the earliest arcade video games, Pong, was programmed — this edition of the DOER has something for everyone in the IT community. We also share one of our favorite secret bodies of knowledge and give some shoutouts to industry news-related musings and important upcoming save-the-dates.

If there was anything we missed or that you want to call out for the next edition of DevOps Enterprise Review, please send us your ideas in the comments section below.

Enjoy reading and we look forward to hearing from you!

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What’s Gene Tweeting?

(Note: all posts sourced from Gene’s Twitter feed, @RealGeneKim)

I had amazing conversation w/@cdavisafc on how difficult and fraught with errors imperative programming is. Here’s a fascinating story from Alan Kay describing the same phenomena! And couldn’t resist doing this in Clojure on iPad using Replete! @mfikes
RT of @t_magennis post: Dependency Constraint Analysis spreadsheet — Enter (even just a few) what teams do work in what order for epics/experiments, and it computes hotspots and likely team constraint ranking. Only handles 7 dependencies, more than that you have bigger problems!
Mind blown. Quora: Answer to How many lines of code was Pong? by Victor Volkov Answer: zero. It was programmed entirely in hardware with discrete logic chips.
RT of @fchollet post: Winners are those who went through *more iterations* of the “loop of progress” — going from an idea, to its implementation, to actionable results. So the winning teams are simply those able to run through this loop *faster*. And this is were Keras gives you an edge.
This is such a fascinating thread. (cc: Felipe Hoffa) Top questions asked on Stack Overflow. Reveals a fascinating glimpse into the obstacles that conspires to prevent developers from achieving their goals on a daily basis. (Many have to do with git, type casting/coercion, HTML buttons) Check!

DevOps Resources — Learn and Grow, Together

Want more frequent updates on DevOps Resources? Be sure to check the IT Revolution DevOps Blog for regular updates!

Build A Bigger Team — Nike

The following is an excerpt from a presentation by Anne Bradley, Chief Privacy Officer and Global Counsel for Nike Direct, and Courtney Kissler, Vice President, Nike Digital Platform Engineering, titled “Build a Bigger Team.”

You can watch the video of the presentation, which was originally delivered at the 2018 DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas.

Thinking Environments: Evaluating Organizational Models for DevOps to Accelerate Business and Empower Workers

While the traditional IT organization is structured into functional silos, DevOps relies on empowered, cross-functional teams. Is it possible to blend the two approaches and work within the traditional structure? Or do you need to restructure your organization to support DevOps? The traditional structure offered a way to continuously improve skills in individual practice areas — software development, infrastructure, operations, and security, for example. When you organize around cross-functional teams, do you lose the ability for more skillful infrastructure experts to oversee and coach more junior infrastructure specialists? And do you lose the opportunity to build capability and expertise within that technical specialty? The traditional functional organization can be highly efficient at allocating expert across different projects, reassigning technical experts based on the company’s needs. Must a DevOps organization sacrifice this efficiency?

These are questions that many of us grapple with as we travel along the DevOps transformation journey to improve our organizations. In this paper, we address those questions, identify some of the models that enterprises and organizations are currently using, and propose some ideas that can help leaders as they plan their future.

WAR AND PEACE AND IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age

With A Seat at the Table, thought leader Mark Schwartz pulled out a chair for CIOs at the C-suite table. Now Mark brings his unique perspective and experience to business leaders looking to lead their company into the digital age by harnessing the expertise and innovation that is already under their roof: IT.

In the war for business supremacy, Schwartz shows we must throw out the old management models and stereotypes that pit suits against nerds. Instead, business leaders of today can foster a space of collaboration and shared mission, a space that puts technologists and business people on the same team.

For business leaders looking to unlock their enterprise’s digital transformation, War and Peace and IT provides clear context and strategies. Schwartz demystifies the role IT plays in the modern enterprise, allowing business leaders to create new strategies for the new digital battleground.

Industry Musings— Read All About It!

Exploring Context in the DevOps Entry Point — The first of a series that identifies the missing pieces in the development of information technology in the enterprise. (Source: Al DuPree, Government CIO)

Why The CDF Launch From Linux Foundation Is Important For The DevOps And Cloud Native Ecosystem — The launch of CDF from Linux Foundation underscores the growing importance of agile software delivery. The success of this foundation depends on the participation of public cloud players and traditional DevOps companies who are committed to working towards the standardization of CI/CD pipelines. (Source: Janakiram MSV, Forbes)

5 Considerations to Get DevOps Right in Telco IT Systems — Implementing DevOps in telco IT systems, such as business support systems/operations support systems (BSS/OSS), is not easy. This is especially true with telcos that overly rely on third-party commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) vendors or systems integrators (SIs) to implement new capabilities, and to run operations. To effectively control the vendors, telcos extensively use traditional levers found in SLAs, KPIs and RFx (requests for whatever). They also reinforce the organizational and mental boundaries between the telco and vendor staff. In a DevOps setup, such a traditional approach is not likely to produce the desired results. (Source: Vishal Augustine, DevOps.com)

The skills and people who ignite DevOps — and fuel its evolution — Companies are quick to boast of DevOps implementation, obscuring actual adoption. As the movement matures and becomes an enterprise staple, true implementation falls to the talent — the people with the skills to make the marriage of development and operations work.

Attracting people across functional areas, from developers to project managers to business leaders, has become more mainstream with more broad enterprise adoption. (Source: Naomi Eide, CIO Dive)

How to scale DevOps: 10 expert tips — Doing DevOps and doing it at scale are two very different things. Several DevOps practitioners and technology leaders chime in on how to push past barriers to wider success. (Source: Carla Rudder, The Enterpriser’s Project)

Reminders and Updates — Mark Your Calendars

Call for Papers, Blind Bird Registration Opens for DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2019!

Hosted at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas from October 28–30, organizers of the DevOps Enterprise Summit USA event have opened its 2019 Call for Papers. Proposals may be submitted through the event website before the submission portal closes on May 28, 2019.

Blind bird registration for DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas has opened as well. To get the best price of admission and guarantee participation, attendees should register no later than May 28 as tickets are expected to sell out early.

Join us for a DevOps Enterprise Summit CrowdChat!

The first of several online social media chats this year with the #DOES19 community, save the date and participate in the upcoming DevOps Enterprise Summit CrowdChat being held on 16 April at 1600 BST / 1100 EST / 800 PST. More info at: https://www.crowdchat.net/DOES19

2019 Book Publishing Update

It’s National Library Week, so be sure to support your local library and give back to the places that house your favorite books, tools and resources (did you know that 1.3 billion people visit public libraries every year!).

Why do we love books? Whether turning the pages of paper, scrolling on a screen or hearing the words being told through your car’s audio entertainment system, books continuously prove to be one of the best learning resources. These sources of knowledge are key to uncovering the ideas about the domains we care about most.

Speaking of knowledge sources, @trimstray and others created an incredibly helpful book-style resource we frequently visit on Github called “The Book of Secret Knowledge” — a collection of inspiring lists, manuals, cheatsheets, blogs, hacks, one-liners, cli/web tools and more. Be sure to check it out, but as the repo states, “Knowledge is powerful, be careful how you use it!”

Also, we see that Emily Freeman is on the home stretch for finishing her new book, DevOps For Dummies, set to be released on July 30, 2019. Best of luck, Emily!

Lastly, congratulations to Wouter de Kort — “DevOps on the Microsoft Stack” has been featured in the Book Authority list of best Devops books of all time!

Thank you for reading the fifth edition of the DevOps Enterprise Review (DOER)! And never forget the golden rule— Get Together and Go Faster!