DevOps is a game changer for us, says Greater London Authority IT chief

David Munn says integration of teams and a change of job profiles has been 'incredibly powerful' for GLA

DevOps, the integration of developers who build and test IT services with the teams responsible for deploying and maintaining IT operations, is a "game changer" for the Greater London Authority (GLA), according to its Head of Information and Communication Technology, David Munn.

Earlier this month, Puppet Labs founder and CEO Luke Kanies suggested that many organisations were approaching DevOps by taking all their ops teams and simply 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. Kanies, who was appearing on a live Computing webcast from London, claimed that this wasn't the right way to implement DevOps.

Munn is mindful of this ‘rebranding exercise' and suggested that the changes he had implemented in his team had proved beneficial. "Agile and DevOps are two sides of the same coin, and I think certainly for us it has been incredibly helpful and positive - it has been a game-changer," he told Computing.

Munn explained that the first part of creating a real DevOps team was to ensure that the development and operations teams were sitting next to each other, which spurred conversations.

"We're the only team in City Hall that is fortunate to have everyone in one space together, so we could have live engineers, development engineers, developers and external developers all working in the same space - it's incredibly powerful," he said.

The agile element of DevOps, Munn said, of being able to develop things quickly and change things that weren't working, had empowered GLA employees. "You get a sense of people working in the team being empowered, they can feel that they are making things happen," he stated.

But does bringing the two teams together mean that Munn has looked at having ‘DevOps' roles as opposed to development or operations teams?

"We're looking at that - it is a work in progress. We had deployment engineers who were working in the development environment and they have become DevOps engineers. That's fine because there is a bit of rebranding about that - but it is really about changing the job profile and looking at how this works," he said.

He added that as the organisation gets used to the DevOps concept and as it increases its use of cloud services, there is scope for a change of more job profiles. But he insists that his team is happy with their current titles and roles - and that no one wants to go back to the way they had been working previously.

The main thing, he believes, is that everyone is of the mindset that they are happy to pitch in wherever they are required.

As for DevOps tools - the firm is using GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Jenkins, Behat/Selenium, JMeter and Nagios and is currently evaluating whether to use Puppet Labs, Chef or Ansible for configuration management.

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