I was lucky enough to attended and be on a panel at yesterdays WinOps London conference, it was a different and very interesting view on DevOps for me. I spend most of my time consulting with test and development teams, with these teams it is very rare to come across a team not using source control and they commonly have some form of automated build too. This means any DevOps discussion usually come from the side of ‘how can I extend my build into deployment…’.
At the conference yesterday, where there seemed to be more IT Pro attendees than developers, this ‘post build’ view of was not the norm. Much of the conference content was focused around the provisioning and configuration of infrastructure, getting the environment ‘ready for deployment of a build’. What surprised me most was how repeatedly speakers stressed the importance of using source control to manage scripts and hence control the version of the environments being provisioning.
So what does this tell us?
The obvious fact to me is that the bifurcation of our industry between Devs and IT Pros means there is a huge scope for swapping each group’s best practices. What seem ingrained best practice for one role is new and interesting for the other. We can all learn from each other – assuming we communicate.
This goes to the core of DevOps, that it is not a tool but a process based around collaboration.
If you want to find out more about how we see DevOps at Black Marble we are running events and are out and about at user groups. Keep an eye on the Black Marble events site or drop me an email.