Is DevOps just a 're-branding' of ops?

Interest in DevOps is intense, but have the roles and responsibilities, even within organisations that have adopted it, really changed?

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," goes the old saying - the more things change, the more they stay the same.

That is certainly the risk with the way in which many organisations are approaching DevOps, warns Puppet Labs founder and CEO Luke Kanies. Appearing on a live Computing webcast from London, Kanies suggested that many organisations' were approaching DevOps in much the same way that they had approached cloud computing just a couple of years ago.

A couple of years ago, he said, "every company had to have a cloud strategy. What we found was that most organisations' private cloud strategies was to rename their VMware vSphere infrastructure to be their private cloud.

"In the same way, a lot of organisations have been implementing DevOps by taking all their ops teams and just calling them DevOps engineers. Or, hiring a slightly more senior ops engineer and giving them a different title, but with fundamentally the same role and the same dynamic.

"That's not the right way to implement DevOps," said Kanies.

Instead of genuinely implementing DevOps structures within IT, many organisations are simply taking the easy route and re-branding accordingly, he warned.

"There is a cultural and organisational change that you have to go through and that change in a lot of organisations, especially mature organisations... if it's not painful you're probably not doing it right", he said.

Iain McInnes, lead DevOps specialist at OVO Energy, on the panel of experts on the same live webcast, agreed.

"The key skills stay the same [but] the direction and the cohesiveness of the teams working together is the key difference," he said. "And implementing such cultural change, especially in well-entrenched teams with equally well-entrenched practices, is never easy."

While to outsiders, the shift might seem logical, to those involved, the upheaval involved shouldn't be underestimated, warned Kief Morris, the author of Infrastructure of Code: Managing Servers in the Cloud and a cloud specialist at consultancy ThoughtWorks.

"It's about finding ways for getting those [two] groups to work better together and various aspects in terms of team structure, culture and automation of working practices," said Morris. "It's about getting ops, the people managing the infrastructure, to align more closely with business outcomes," he added.

Naturally, automation of working practices will make staff who could be affected nervous and, potentially, hostile.

For Kanies, whose company's software has been instrumental to the spread of DevOps, a big bang approach - in which IT is re-organised from the top down - may not be wise.

"Start with a small team," Kanies advised. "It's a huge mistake to have an executive-level strategic move to having a DevOps team and DevOps delivery. That's a great way to make sure that you get nothing done over three years," said Kanies.

Instead, he advised, put together a "stealth squad" of people in a single business area to provide, effectively, a proof of concept to prove not only that it works, but that it will be beneficial for everyone working in both development and operations - or, if it doesn't work (for whatever reasons) it won't affect the wider business too much.

"You want to do it in a place that gives your team the opportunity to learn and the time to learn. But you also want to pick an area that if it works, it's genuinely meaningful. So, pick a high-pressure area that has a real opportunity to deliver meaningful value and then, when that works you can take what you have learnt from that and 'spread success out'," said Kanies.

Then, he suggested, the organisation can spread DevOps via the experts its cultivated team-by-team over the course of three or so years.

Smaller organisations, he admitted, might not have much choice in the matter than to adopt a "big bang" approach. "But at larger organisations you don't want to try to do this in a way that means that failure makes the front page of the Financial Times," he added.

Computing's DevOps Summit will be in London on 5th July, and is free to qualifying IT professionals. Hear from end users, including Sky, Hiscox and Ovo Energy, how they implemented DevOps in their organisations, as well as best practice seminars from Chef, Puppet, Splunk and other big-names in DevOps