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DevOps flow sketch with CI/CD, containers, monitoring, and the infinity loop
AGIMA DevOps Meetup · June 28, 2021

DevOps culture: myths and reality

Clearing out the myths, then looking at what actually grew at scale

/ DevOps Culture: Myths and Reality · AGIMA 2021

Slide contents

  1. 1. DevOps culture: myths and reality

    Clearing out the myths, then looking at what actually grew at scale

  2. 2. The myths first, then what practice produced

    What we'll cover

    Myths: who, what, how

    Reality: business and IT

    Teams and maturity

    Conclusions

  3. 3. 01. Myths

    Who, what and how — three ways to miss

  4. 4. There is no such thing as a devops person

    What people call one

    Not a single person

    Not an org unit next to dev and ops

    Not the person who knows how to do everything

    Not the old sysadmin, and not a dev who runs CI/CD

  5. 5. Devops gets swapped for its own form

    What it gets passed off as

    Not a set of the right fashionable technologies

    Not another name for ITIL/ITSM

    Not just a buzzword about development culture

  6. 6. Quick moves do not buy a culture

    How to «do devops» from the outside

    Consultants who preach about culture

    Consultants who pitch fashionable technologies

    Consultants who outsource CI/CD into a black box

    Buying an external team wholesale

  7. 7. 02. Reality

    How it started and what it turned into

  8. 8. Infrastructure grew into an internal product

    One stack, two viewpoints

    Physical infrastructure — what sits in the rack

    Virtual infrastructure and IaaS — a resource on demand

    PaaS and applications — what the business pays for

    The business looks from above, IT from below

  9. 9. The development team owns its own production

    The modern approach to building software

    Separate services instead of monoliths

    The team writes the code and runs it through CI/CD

    The engineering team provides *aaS: PaaS, IaaS, DBaaS

    And the tooling: logging, monitoring, service mesh, GitLab CI

  10. 10. Core and engineering merged into a platform team

    Splitting into stream-aligned and platform teams

    Development split into stream-aligned and core

    Stream-aligned teams simply build business features

    Core took on the shared tooling

    Core and engineering merged to build the PaaS

  11. 11. 03. Teams and maturity

    The Team Topologies reading

  12. 12. Each team type has its own customer

    Four team types and three interaction modes

    Stream-aligned team — the flow of business value

    Platform team — an internal product

    Enabling team — helps others adopt practices

    Complicated-subsystem team — narrow expertise

  13. 13. A platform appears where scale and maturity meet

    Engineering maturity against org size

    Small scale: specialists and dense collaboration

    More maturity: end-to-end ownership

    More scale: specialists on top of a PaaS

    Both at once: the focus shifts to reliability

  14. 14. 04. Conclusions

    What to take with you

  15. 15. Devops is about joining development and operations

    And about how that looks at different scales

    Devops is an overloaded term

    It is surrounded by a lot of myths

    At its core it joins development and operations

    At large scale: stream-aligned plus platform teams, with the platform teams building a PaaS

    At small scale: teams are better off taking a cloud PaaS

  16. 16. What to read next

    The links from the talk's closing slide

    The «Team Topologies» book — with a three-part summary

    An article on product and platform team collaboration

    An article on the limits of reusing shared solutions

    Stanislav Khalup's talk «DevOps eras at Tinkoff»

  17. 17. Thank you!

    polomodov.tech

    All slides and links — in the Telegram channel

    Alexander Polomodov, Technical Director & Fellow, T-Technologies

    @book_cube