DevOps Enterprise Review #6

Gene’s links, DevOps resources, industry musings, & more

#DOES19 London

Published in

IT Revolution

8 min readMay 1, 2019

Hello, DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) Community!

With the sixth edition of the DevOps Enterprise Review, our journey into the world of DevOps and IT in the Enterprise continues!

If this is your first venture into our bi-monthly periodical, the purpose of this content is to serve as a regularly updated repository with loads of resources and information to help keep the enterprise IT community connected. By reporting on the happenings in and around the industry, we can keep one another up to date on the practices and patterns that are driving businesses forward (or backward) and ultimately, make the lives of IT professionals better.

This edition of the DevOps Enterprise Review (otherwise known as the “DOER”) features several learning resources and industry updates to continue the conversation.

From highlighting tactics for leading change to survey results that shine a light on the Dev side of the equation, there’s something for every human of DevOps to enjoy. There’s also a great Continuous Delivery case study from retail giant Walmart, software delivery trends to keep in mind, and some new book titles to add to your library in 2019. Last, but not least, we made sure to provide updates on the most recent developments for the DevOps Enterprise Summit London event — fewer than 60 days away!

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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Gene’s Links of the Month

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

Reshared from @patrick_oshag: 5 jobs of a CEO: 1. Set strategy 2. Deliver capital to pursue that strategy 3. Build team to execute 4. Communicate the hell out of the strategy internally and externally 5. Hold people accountable.
Reshared from @eliistender10: 23 emotions people feel, but can’t explain.
Reshared from @sjkilleen: Audible gasps from audience when @RealGeneKim reveals that andon cords are pulled at Toyota *3,500 times per day*. Magnifying errors and issues as a way to avoid accrued debt. One of those stats that is going to change how I think.
Reshared from @QuinnyPig: Something that gets lost a lot in cloud discussions: if you build an app and let it sit in a cloud provider for a decade, it gets better. Reliability improves, hardware gets faster. Do that on-prem and the raccoons take your site down by year 3.
Awesome presentation by Marco Marini. App for traders written in Angular 1 / JS being gradually migrated to re-frame / react / ClojureScript. I’ve always wondered how you can run multiple UI frameworks at the same time. I’ve heard about this happening in other places, too.

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!

Scaling Continuous Delivery At Walmart

Read an excerpt from a presentation by Dana Finster, Sr. Software Engineer, and Bryan Finster, Staff Software Engineer at Walmart, titled “Scaling Continuous Delivery at Walmart.”

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

Tactics for Leading Change: Evaluating What DevOps Patterns and Practices Would Work Best for Your Enterprise

If you are leading a DevOps transformation, a large part of your success will come from your ability to lead change at different levels in the organization. Achieving these changes will be hard, time-consuming, and require persistence, but they are worth the effort when your organization begins reaping the benefits from the transformation.

This paper describes two perspectives you might encounter within the organization as you lead change: the executive and the middle manager. For each perspective, we identify what these individuals care about and what problems they typically encounter. This paper also covers the target mindset we want to create within the organization — a target mindset aligned with DevOps patterns and practices. Individuals in different roles will interpret and apply this mindset differently, so we also identify the different mindset shifts we want to affect. Finally, we identify tactics to use that could be effective at changing current mindset to the target mindset.

Authors: Courtney Kissler, Eric Passmore, Jeff Gallimore, Jeff Robke, Nicole Forsgren, Paula Thrasher, Pauly Comtois, Raphael Garcia, Rosalind Radcliffe, Ross Clanton, Scott Nasello, Scott Willson.

Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

Today’s IT workers are drowning in nonstop requests for time, days filled to the brim with meetings, and endless nights spent heroically fixing the latest problems. This churn and burn is creating a workforce constantly on the edge of burnout.

In this timely book, IT time management expert Dominica DeGrandis reveals the real crime of the century — time theft, one of the most costly factors impacting enterprises in their day-to-day operations.

Through simple solutions that make work visible, DeGrandis helps people round up the five thieves of time and take back their lives with timesaving solutions. Chock-full of exercises, takeaways, real-world examples, colorful diagrams, and an easy-going writing style, readers will quickly learn effective practices to create high-performing workflows within an organization.

Industry Musings — Read All About It!

7 advantages of open source for agile teams — Open source and agile and DevOps teams go hand-in-hand. Here’s a look at the benefits from several IT experts. (Source: Carla Rudder, The Enterpriser’s Project)

DevOps Chat: Future of the ‘Accelerate: State of DevOps’ Report with Nicole Forsgren — “Accelerate — The State of DevOps Report” by Dr. Nicole Forsgren and the folks at DORA (now part of Google) is far and away the most widely cited research in the DevOps field. Dr. Forsgren and her team have brought scientific rigor to the survey over these past six years and the results show it. (Source: Alan Shimel, DevOps.com)

Summary of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019 — In the annual survey of developers, Stack Overflow respondents were again overwhelmingly male, with over 90% identifying as such. There has been little change since 2011. Based on the survey responses, the chances of this imbalance correcting itself soon is low. The proportion of professional developers that identify as male is aligned with the number of student developers. (Source: Reda Hmeid, InfoQ.com)

Track your software delivery better: 3 trends to watch — Over the past decade, software has made giant leaps in allowing us to track, analyze, and visualize the incredible amounts of data flowing across our organizations. Storage is rarely a bottleneck, advances in non-relational databases have helped capture growing volumes of data, and machine-learning approaches promise to assist with deriving meaning and insight. If you have been tasked with providing insights or visibility into the data locked up in tools used to plan, code, deliver, and support your organization’s software, here are three trends you should be aware of. (Source: Mik Kersten, TechBeacon)

Learning from DevOps: Why complex systems necessitate new ITSM thinking — Jon Hall argues that a deconstructive analysis and reimagining of IT service management is critical to ensuring its relevance and value into the future. The work of Charity Majors, Richard Cook and Dave Snowden highlights complexity as one of the major forcing factors behind this rethinking. Complexity is increasing, complex systems fail in complex ways, and complex failures need dynamic and adaptive responses. (Source: Jon Hall, Medium)

Reminders and Updates — Mark Your Calendars

The Program Agenda is Live for DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019

Hosted at the InterContinental London Hotel — The O2 from 25–27 June, The DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019 will convene for three full days of immersive learning about IT transformation patterns and practices.

The 2019 program agenda focuses on helping attendees achieve their desired outcomes by incorporating extended opportunities to network with the speakers and learn from domain experts in regards to the subject matters they care about most. The organizing committee has unveiled plans for numerous activities, including a shared Slack workspace, Auditors’ Workshop, Lean Coffee sessions, Lightning Talks and more.

Las Vegas Call for Papers and Blind Bird Registration is Open

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.

2019 Book Publishing Update

As book publishers, books are obviously a passion for the IT Revolution team. They help us learn, help us grow, and can spark the imagination at anytime or any place (unless of course, you have trouble reading while riding in a car).

Some exciting book publishing updates have occurred since the last DOER — read on and see what new titles will be hitting bookshelves soon!

First, congratulations to a DevOps Enterprise Summit alum, and author from the DevOps Forum — Cornelia Davis is done with her new book! Here is her note about in on Twitter: “ I did something this afternoon that’s been a long time coming. I had the cycles to look in on and respond to posts on my book forum. Book is done, production well underway and I have some breathing room for this. Feels so damn good! Get your copy of Cornelia’s book here>>> Cloud Native Patterns: Designing change-tolerant software.

Second, another congratulations is in order for Sidney Dekker, who also has a new book on sale: Foundations of Safety Science: A Century of Understanding Accidents and Disasters. Sidney’s book covers the origins of major schools of safety thinking, and traces the heritage and interlinkages of the ideas that make up safety science today.

Third, did you happen to catch the #DOES19 CrowdChat on April 16? It was not only highly attended and captivating conversation, but it also slipped out that Gene Kim is in the middle of a new book project. Here’s the first public info on The Unicorn Project, coming November 2019 as the follow-on to The Phoenix Project.

Thank you for reading the sixth edition of the DevOps Enterprise Review (DOER)! We hope to see you in London so we can “Get Together and Go Faster!”