With an ever-increasing array of tools and technologies claiming to 'enable DevOps', how do we know which tools to try or to choose? In-house, open source, or commercial? Ruby or shell? Dedicated or plugins? It transpires that highly collaborative practices such as DevOps and Continuous Delivery require new ways of assessing tools and technologies in order to avoid creating new silos. Matthew Skelton shares his recent experience of helping many different organisations to evaluate and select tools to facilitate DevOps; the recommendations may surprise you. Slides from Unicom DevOps Summit, 26th June 2014, London

1. How to choose tools
for DevOps
Matthew Skelton, Skelton Thatcher Consulting
Unicom DevOps Summit,
26 June 2014, London, UK

2. Collaboration
Learning
Singleton tools
Conway’s Law

3. Matthew Skelton
•15 years building &
operating software systems
•Cybernetics + Neuroscience
• control engineering
• psychology
• ‘network’ interactions
@matthewpskelton

4. Help orgs to adopt and sustain
good engineering practices
Interim CTO/Head of X, tech strategy,
architecture, workshops, delivery

5. DevOps
Ongoing, highly effective
collaboration between
Development and Operations*
*also QA/Testing, IT Service Desk,
Programme Management,
Commercial, Marketing, etc.

6. Not DevOps
“Automation”
“Build & Release”
“Infrastructure Development”
“System Administration”

8. Collaboration

9. 1. Version Control

16. 2. Deployment Pipeline

20. Challenges were:
•Limited Git skills in Service team
•Manual deployments
•‘Snowflake’ servers
•No CI
•Risks: security, automation, etc

21. http://bit.ly/thetrainline-weekly-deploy

22. What we did
•Built a walking skeleton pipeline
•Modelled security roles and stages
•Included manual steps (at first)
•Walked people through steps
•Finally: opened firewall so
everyone could see the UI

23. Results
•Security: happy
•Service team: relieved (& happy)
•Developers: won over (& happy)
•Business: surprised (& happy)

24. 3. Log Aggregation

25. LogStash
•ElasticSearch+ LogStash+ Kibana
•ELK
•In Production, Pre-Prod, Test
•On developer machines!!!

26. http://rashidkpc.github.io/Kibana/images/screenshots/searchss.png

27. Collaboration
& tool choice
Value collaboration as
a key criterion
Orthogonal to main purpose (?)
“How does [the use of] this tool
help people to collaborate?”

28. Learning

31. Learning & tool choice
Bring people with you
Appreciate current skills
Prefer achievable gains now
Avoid fear of too-scary tools

32. Singleton tools

34. http://www.walpapershddownload.com/highland-cattle-wallpapers/

35. Singleton tool
Breaks feedback (learning) loop
from Production
Makes CI/CD more difficult
Underestimates value of
collaboration and learning

36. Conway’s Law

37. Mel Conway, 1968
“organizations which design
systems ... are constrained to
produce designs which are copies
of the communication structures
of these organizations”
http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html

39. DevOps Topologies

40. DevOps Topologies

41. DevOps Topologies

42. DevOps Topologies

43. Conway & Tool Choice
See the organisation as a system
Separate tools for separate teams
Shared tools for collaborative
teams
http://bit.ly/DevOpsTopologies

44. Conway’s Law
•Allan Kelly - @allankellynet
•https://vimeo.com/channels/londoncd

46. How to choose tools
for DevOps
Value collaboration aspects
Avoid a learning mountain:
evolve tooling
Avoid Production-only tools
Consider Conway’s Law
(this list is incomplete!)

47. Further reading
HighOps Operability eBook
bit.ly/OperabilityEbook
Build Quality In
buildqualityin.com

48. Thank you
matthewskelton.net / @matthewpskelton
skeltonthatcher.com
HT: @Squire_Matt, @alan_parkinson