We are all DevOps

I gave a talk recently at the Forward Tech away day entitled We Are All DevOps and it went down quite well. Forward is an unusual environment, the devs are trusted to do lots of the typical sysadmin role and the boundary between Dev and Ops is very blurred. During my first few months in the search team I kept mindmapping stuff I wanted to talk about but only got round to making the slides the day before so it was a bit underprepared but I hope useful for people.

I borrowed ideas from John Leach’s excellent Ruby: Reinventing the Wheel talk, this DepOps: The War Is Over presentation and rambled incoherently about a talk I just saw at the UKUUG Spring Conference from the author of cfengine, see here a nice description of the project (you can see how it has influenced Puppet)

Here are the slides

I like the James White Manifesto, it chimes really strongly with me.

On Infrastructure

• There is one system, not a collection of systems.
• The desired state of the system should be a known quantity.
• The “known quantity” must be machine parseable.
• The actual state of the system must self-correct to the desired state.
• The only authoritative source for the actual state of the system is the system.
• The entire system must be deployable using source media and text files.

Soon they will post videos and I will get to see myself give a talk for the first time.