Work in Ops? Get used to becoming more like Dev, warns Puppet

Describing infrastructure as code will drive efficiencies in operations that developers have enjoyed for decades

Techies working in operations will have to get used to becoming more like developers as the use of DevOps practices and tools spreads, according to Tim Zonca, director of product marketing at IT automation software maker Puppet.

Speaking at Computing's IT Leaders Forum in the City of London this morning, Zonca said: "Where you have to start with DevOps is describing your infrastructure as code. Depending on your role in the organisation, that can sound a bit nerdy.

"But what this means is, if you take a look at what happened in the development landscape in the last few decades, developers were able to adopt agile practices because they were able to put things into version control systems, check it in and out, do peer review, unit testing, share code so they could scale better across teams.

"Well, they had the luxury of doing that because all of this [that they were working on] was code. Code is easy to email to someone. It's easy to post on a web site and download so you don't have to write stuff from scratch. It's easy to stick on a repository and version control it. It's easy to automate the testing of that," said Zonca.

"If you're managing 'tin' as someone on an infrastructure team, how do you peer-review that? How do you check it in and check it out? You can't. So if you start to define or describe your infrastructure as code, now you can do all the same sorts of things that developers have practised for the past couple of decades for your infrastructure," he added.

The key, of course, is the adoption of the appropriate tools so that infrastructure can be expressed as code, and changes rolled out across an entire hardware estate - whether physical hardware or virtual servers running in the cloud under, for example, Amazon Web Services.

As a result, though, this means that operations are facing some considerable changes in the way that they work. "One of the foundational tenets of DevOps is to make it visible. It's the idea of transparency. Collaboration is the key practice in DevOps and transparency is required," said Zonca.

He continued: "So, the first stage is, establish a single source of the truth. This usually means, what are you doing today? What are your current processes? Where do they work? And - be really honest with yourself - where don't they work, and where are they broken? Those are the places where you'll likely see the biggest bang for your buck most quickly.

"Then, look at standardising processes and the 'artefacts' of those. I think Ops teams today are in a better spot then ever for adopting DevOps practices," said Zonca.

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