DevOps Enterprise Review #8

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

#DOES19 London

Published in

IT Revolution

9 min readJun 13, 2019

Hello, DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) Community!

In the eighth edition of the DevOps Enterprise Review, we continue to try and elevate the state of technology work and quantify the economic and human costs associated with sub-optimal IT performance. Why? In order to help improve the lives of the millions of IT professionals around the world.

If this is your first time reading our bi-monthly periodical, the purpose of DevOps Enterprise Review (otherwise known as the “DOER”) is to serve as a community of resources and repository of information to help technology leaders and DevOps practitioners advance the enterprise IT transformation patterns and practices for all to benefit.

As written by Reinhardt Krause for Investor’s Business Daily this week, DevOps has created a “Digital Shift That Turns Any Firm Into A Software Maker.” The movement has become bigger than most had envisioned and now is firmly in the mainstream. But, there’s still plenty to learn and even more to keep track of as the DevOps enterprise movement continues to grow and evolve.

Below, you will find the latest Stack Overflow survey results from nearly 90,000 developers, practical approaches to convincing the DevOps holdouts (and holdups), background information on the recent Google outage, and several publishing updates that are sure to grab the imagination.

And, we made sure to include the most recent updates for the upcoming DevOps Enterprise Summit London event — only 12 days away!

If there was anything we missed or that you want to call out for the next edition of DOER, 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)

Nice! A web page that lets you paste an Excel table, and get Markdown encoded table back! cc @nicolefv @jezhumble @stephenmagill
Reshared from adrian cockcroft: Information on the weekend’s Google outage. It was an incorrectly scoped config change compounded by the inability to observe and operate systems in a degraded state — I blogged about needing independent monitoring last year
Reshared from @bendhalpern: Probably one of the most auto-bookmarkable post I’ve seen in a while, regardless of skill level with git.
Reshared from John Cutler: the shift to focusing on customer lifetime value (LTV) is, in my mind, a rallying call for #design. So much “growth hacking” is top-of-the-funnel success theater. Once we focus on the long-term relationship between the customer and the product … that’s in design’s wheelhouse.
Reshared from Greg Ip: “Software is eating the world,” @pmarca said 8 years ago. He was early, but right: Microsoft’s reclamation of most-valuable-company title signifies a second tech-led boom may be underway, driven by software instead of hardware. My column.
Reshared from @dbsmasher: “The aim of a resilient organization is not stability, but sustainability.” Article referenced is here.
Reshared from An J.: Today, I gave a very personal and vulnerable talk about my journey into tech. This was uncomfortable for me, but attendees thanking me for providing a different perspective made it worthwhile. Thank you #JoyOfCoding for allowing me to share. Slides are here.

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!

Q&A With Mark Schwartz And Gene Kim

Recently, Gene Kim had a chance to speak with Mark Schwartz about Mark’s new book, War and Peace and IT, Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age.

Kim and Schwartz discuss the inspiration behind writing a book about IT management, what technology leaders can learn from reading this book, the connection to Napolean, and more!

Individual Contributors: From Holdouts to Holdups

The objective of this paper is to identify the individual(s) that could be considered critical to the organization and are the lone holdouts to the DevOps transformation. These holdouts are often longer-term employees that have historically experienced false starts around transformational change. These failed attempts at driving toward a new framework or culture may have disenfranchised the individual contributors and caused them to withdraw from supporting the efforts.

This paper will seek to identify practical approaches to categorizing the personalities of resistant individuals and help identify a clear path that will align them closer to the movement. Developing an understanding of the root cause of the behavior will be derived through the evaluation of incentives, drivers, fears, and the contextual knowledge of the employee. The approach must be lightweight, easy to implement, non-destructive/non-threatening, and provide value to transformation.

Authors: Pauly Comtois, Chris Hill, Scott Nasello, Avigail Ofer and Anders Wallgren.

The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

More than ever, the effective management of technology is critical for business competitiveness. For decades, technology leaders have struggled to balance agility, reliability, and security. The consequences of failure have never been greater―whether it’s the healthcare.gov debacle, cardholder data breaches, or missing the boat with Big Data in the cloud.

And yet, high performers using DevOps principles, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Etsy, and Netflix, are routinely and reliably deploying code into production hundreds, or even thousands, of times per day.

Following in the footsteps of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook shows leaders how to replicate these incredible outcomes, by showing how to integrate Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, and Information Security to elevate your company and win in the marketplace.

Written by: Gene Kim, Jez Humble, John Willis and @patrickdebois

Industry Musings — Read All About It!

Getting the Enterprise Digital Core in Shape — While enterprises rush to transform their business digitally, most are taking tactical steps rather than building a comprehensive digital core that can be improved over time. Very few are taking a thorough view of their entire technology portfolio and looking for ways to create a cohesive core — their digital core — to provide them the strength and stability to move forward swiftly in their digitization efforts. (Source: George V. Hulme, DevOps.com)

How to migrate legacy code bases to continuous delivery — How do you take code that’s four years old and hundreds of thousands of source lines long and turn that into a lean, mean, continuous-deploying machine? How do you build a road map to go from a product that may take weeks or months to deploy out to customers into one that may deploy several times an hour?

And how do you ensure that your product that’s deploying several times an hour is doing so safely and sanely, and isn’t shoveling bad patch after bad patch onto your production system? (Source: Melissa Benua, TechBeacon)

How Government Can Accelerate the Adoption of DevOps — States and localities are saddled with legacy tech debt, but the problem can be fixed by delivering the variety, quality and timeliness of public services citizens expect, using this transformational, collaborative methodology.

This article is the second in a series on the growth of DevOps as a more impactful, collaborative IT development model that state and local governments can adopt to deliver services with both speed and quality. (Source: John Osborne, Government Technology)

Engineering managers, DevOps specialists top earners among developers, survey shows — Engineering managers and DevOps specialists are the top earners among the world’s software developers. They are also the most satisfied with their jobs.

That’s one of the many takeaways from the latest Stack Overflow survey, covering 88,883 developers across the globe. The survey confirms that DevOps and data science-related pursuits are seeing the highest pay levels. (Source: Joe McKendrick, ZDNet)

DevOps rebels against ‘an ancient, powerful order’ of IT — The influence of software developers have taken over the business world, with DevOps mentalities driving innovative startups to great success, from Facebook to Amazon to Netflix.

But the agility of software-led business can be lost on legacy enterprises, now looking to keep pace with a cloud-native, mobile-ready world. (Source: Teryn O’Brien, SiliconAngle)

Reminders and Updates — Mark Your Calendars

Two Weeks Away from DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019

It’s that time of year where we’re only a few weeks away from DevOps Enterprise Summit London and Gene and the programming committee are incredibly excited for our fourth event there.

One of the big changes for the London conference this year is that it is now a three-day conference — one day longer than in previous years. If you want to read about why Gene Kim is so excited about this change and all that the programming committee has done to make the London event the best DevOps Enterprise Summit yet, head on over to his preview post here>>>.

And, if you haven’t registered yet, you can still use the Friends of Gene code, “FOG15” at checkout for 15% off when you register for the event!

DOES19 Las Vegas Announces First Speakers, Opens Early Bird Registration

The programming committee for DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas has announced the first round of speakers, including:

Andre Martin VP/CLO, Learning and Development, Target
Erica Morrison, Executive Director, Software Development, CSG
Scott Prugh, Chief Architect & VP Software Development, CSG

If you plan to attend, you can receive discounted registration through Early Bird pricing for a limited time. Register here before the offer expires.

The event takes place at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas from October 28–30.

2019 Book Publishing Update

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

Yep. We love books here at IT Revolution. And, we get so excited when we see our friends publishing new books to add to our bookshelves.

If you’re into learning more about the patterns and practices in the emerging Cloud Native world, be sure to follow what Cornelia Davis is doing. She is currently celebrating her new book on this very subject and documenting the updates on her Twitter.

Also, no matter where you are in your digital transformation journey, be sure to find a copy of @jack_maher & @carmendeardo’s “Standing on Shoulders” book. You can check out Alan Fahrner’s interview with them at https://dataguy.me/2019/06/interview-maher-and-

IT Revolution author Manuel Pais just sent back his final edits to his and Matthew Skelton’s new book, “Team Topologies” that is now available for pre-order. Per Manuel on Twitter, “ That’s it, done editing! No more changes (for the first edition at least)! The @TeamTopologies book will soon be on its way to the printer, you can pre-order now :) — thank you @ITRevBooks for the opportunity https://buff.ly/2ERVUFx.”

Last but not least, we are always interested in getting opinions about our books. And, when folks like Gunter Rotsaert are kind enough to take the time/effort to write up a formal review, we become gitty with joy. See Gunter’s recap of his thoughts on The Phoenix Project on DZone and let us know if you’ve had similar or different takeaways as well.

Thank you for reading the eighth edition of the DevOps Enterprise Review (DOER)! We hope to see you in London in under two weeks, where we can all “Get Together and Go Faster!”