DevOps Driving the “Big Fat Rethink” at DevOpsDays Silicon Valley 2014

DevOpsDays attracts the best and brightest from both development and operations: the ones who want to change how companies deliver software and improve the value delivered to the business. These leaders are challenging the current state of IT, and for good reason.  The status quo is lacking in quality and not responsive enough to the business.  The DevOps leaders are looking at new ways to change the work culture, the processes that deliver software and the technologies and tools to delivery that competitive edge to the business.  Their work is driving a “BIG FAT RETHINK” on the whole traditional “People, Process and Technology” for building and deploying software.

John Willis opened up this year’s DevOpsDays Silicon Valley with a keynote on the “Big Fat Rethink.” He used the latest DevOps survey to point out that IT Performance is a Competitive Advantage, and one of the strongest predicators of IT Performance is an organizational culture that exhibits high trust, cross functional collaboration, shared responsibilities and continuous learning. These are DevOps principles and a big rethink on the traditional waterfall approach with silos of expertise and responsibility. John also discussed the big rethink on “Software as Infrastructure” extending it to the network and the entire data center, proposing a big fat rethink on extending declarative and desired state infrastructure beyond server configs, packaging and VM provisioning. Software Defined Everything, a Consumable Composable Infrastructure that deals with the intra-relationships of components and can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements.  Software is powering the world and the DevOps crew gets it!

There was also a “Big Fat Rethink” on the enterprise applicability of DevOps principles and practices. Adam Auerbach of Capital One gave a great presentation entitled, “How Capital One put Quality in the Driver’s seat thru DevOps and other Best Practices.” He provided a terrific overview of how his team transformed Capital One’s software delivery using DevOps.  Capital One currently has 30 teams leveraging DevOps practices, and they are running DevOps processes across all frameworks (Java, .NET) and legacy apps, including the mainframe. They are using Kanban and have leveraged the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to bootstrap their DevOps teams. This was a terrific example of how an enterprise did a “rethink” on their software delivery process, and how indeed, DevOps is ready for the enterprise!

Finally, the conference offered up a “Bit Fat Rethink” on ITIL. There was an Openspaces discussion on the impact of DevOps on ITIL. The head of ITSM from Axelos was in attendance, and we discussed how Continuous Delivery is driving a rethink on Change Advisory Boards (do we need them?)  and the whole ITIL Service Transition process.  There was good discussion about ITIL moving forward and how DevOps and ITIL can complement each other.  This will the main topic of our next DevOps Drive-in webcast featuring Pink’s George Spalding on July 24th.

DevOpsDays is a forum that challenges the current way teams, processes and tools are used to deliver software to the business. Lots to rethink about!

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