5 Keys to Building a Successful DevOps Culture: Serena Software DevOps DriveIn, May 2014

1. 5 Keys to Building a Successful
DevOps Culture
Mandi Walls
Technical Practice Manager, Chef
DevOps Drive-In, May 22, 2014

2. whoami
• Mandi Walls
• Technical Practice Manager @ Chef
• @lnxchk
• Author of “Building A DevOps Culture”
• http://www.oreilly.com/velocity/free/building-devops-culture.csp

3. DevOps at 50,000 Feet
It is:
a cultural and professional movement
It isn’t:
a job description, new team, or solitary
organization

4. Why DevOps
• New practices that emerged from the maturation of web operations
• A deeper reliance on technology in more industries
• Desire from customers and stakeholders
A drive toward more
interaction,
responsiveness,
interconnectedness

5. Components of DevOps
• CAMS
• As described by John Willis in What DevOps Means To Me, 7/16/10
• Culture
• Automation
• Measurement
• Sharing
http://www.getchef.com/blog/2010/07/16/what-devops-means-to-me/

6. Culture
• Shared values and behaviors
• There’s no right culture for DevOps, but there are characteristics:
• Supportive
• Open to experimentation
• Flexible
• Collaborative
• Trusting
• If your organization isn’t these things, you have to build them

7. Building or Changing Culture
• This is hard.
• No, like, seriously hard.
• Focus on behaviors and values
• Tools influence behavior
• How you use them, what you use them for, influences values

8. Transforming Your Organization to DevOps
• Technologists love tools!
• No one can sell you a “DevOps Solution”, the “C” part is hard work!
• Our 5 Keys:
• Setting Goals
• Gaining Executive Support
• Building Pilot Projects
• Training and Prioritization
• Outreach And Evangelism

9. Key 1: Setting Goals

10. Why Are You DevOpping?
• Focus on measurable improvements
• “We want to reduce our new-release install time from 16 hours to 90
minutes.”
• “We want to reduce our new feature time-to-market from 6 months to
5 days.”
• Challenging!
• Do you have the initial metrics?
• Or do things just feel wrong?

11. Good Goals
• Your goals should matter to lots of people in your organization
• “DevOps” is really just short for “DevProductSupportNetSecBizOps”

12. Goals in Numerous Places
• The goals you choose to focus on shouldn’t be in opposition to any
team’s individual goal
• That’s not a way to get support when you need it!
• If you don’t know what matters, talk to people!
• Broaden your scope of stakeholders
• Look for complimentary goals
Lower TTM + More testing + Fewer Bugs in Prod
=
Introducing Some Automation

13. Key 2: Gaining Executive Support

14. Air Cover
• The right goals will get buy in
• Your DevOps transformation will need some people, some budget,
some time
• You may have to move people around, or change their workloads

15. Skunkworks
• It’s tempting to just go for it and hope for the best
• In some organizations this definitely works!
• In others, you’ll want someone to help cut through red tape and make
resources available

16. Silos
• Exist for reasons
• If your silos are skills based,
they can become porous
• Network
• Security
• Storage
• Have to be addressed in a
constructive manner
https://www.flickr.com/photos/97367204@N06/11391488416

17. Non-Executive Influencers
• Prominent team members that people look up to
• Look for informal lines of influence
• “Let’s see what Bob thinks of that” or “We should ask Jane”
Look for the People Everyone Wants on Their Team

18. The Role of Management in a DevOps Transition
• Workload prioritization
• Influence on external teams
• “Who do I have to talk to to make this happen?”
• Managing personnel issues
• Orgs in transition may end up moving people to new teams, changing
someone’s role drastically, letting people go, or other scary things
• You want someone respected in your organization to back your
project

19. Key 3: Building Pilot Projects

20. http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/250x250/49589360.jpg

21. Why a Pilot?
• CAMS
• Creating a Culture
• Building Automation
• Measuring all the Things
• Sharing What Happens
• If these aren’t natural to your team, you need a place to practice

22. Picking A Pilot
• Management support
• Start small, but deep
• Flush out all the gnarly bumps in the road
• Representative of real work

23. What Makes a Good Pilot
• Working with modern platforms
• Programming language, OS version
• Also interfaces – loosely coupled upstream and downstream
• Brand new, greenfield is good!
• Established projects with a new release are too!
• Teams are open to experimentation

24. Development Team
• Might be changing their work a bit
• Giving them new tools
• Expecting different results
• Are they engaged in the M?!?
• Participating in oncall, outage response, deployment

25. Product
• New DevOps activities might take time away from writing code
• Establishing priority across multiple goals

26. Operations
• The most common target team for “DevOps”
• Easy to overburden, need explicit prioritization
• DevOps will be more than “Operations with more coding”
• Work often focuses on the A and M parts of CAMS

27. QA, Release Engineering
• Moving towards increasing automation
• Requirement of advanced skills

28. Customer Support
• The place to find out what customers care about
• Find things like “Customers want more features and fixes faster” vs
“Customers demand 100% uptime”

29. Key 4: Training and Prioritization

30. Training
• Train everyone
• On new tools, on new workflows
• Training is part of sharing – everyone gets a chance to have
experience

31. Moving Workloads
• The folks who have to learn new things have to have time to do it
• Some of their current work will have to be deprioritized or moved
• Everyone on the team should get a chance to do new stuff – don’t
leave someone behind to maintain the old stuff alone

32. Setting Expectations
• Don’t kill anyone for DevOps
• It takes time to learn new tools, no matter how excited the team is
about it
• Your entire project will take time as well

33. Helping the Lost or Disgruntled
• Any change has effects on the organizations involved
• It’s likely that adoption and enthusiasm will not be universal
• Up to management to incentivize, reward
• Make the hard decisions about an individual’s future with the group

34. Hiring for DevOps?
• No.
• Expecting brand-new individual contributors to change your culture is
a losing proposition
• Organizational change can be germinated from new leadership
• Still requires influence, credibility, the right person

35. Key 5: Outreach and Evangelism

36. Showing Off
• Talk about your project
• Internally
• Externally
• All the time
• Use different venues
• Brown bags sessions, formal workshops, larger talks, All-Hands
• Documents, video, graphs!

37. Tiger Team
• Help other teams navigate
• Have a multitude of skills
• Establish practice for workflows, feedback, improvements
• Potentially act as helpdesk on new tools and processes

38. Bonus: 3 Helpful Tips

39. Having Patience
• It will take time
• Some will be experimental
• You won’t do it perfectly the first time

40. Engage with Management
• Use the right PKIs
• Manage to people and to tools

41. Over Communicate
If you feel like you’re talking about it too
much, you’re probably just about right

42. Thank You
@lnxchk

43. Check out Chef!
• Configuration management
• Linux, Windows, AIX, other Unixes
• Learn More:
• https://learnchef.opscode.com/
• https://getchef.com
• Follow us on Twitter: @chef