DevOps : Why do you focus on Flow and Automation?

A few weeks ago I did a DevOps “Lunch & Learn” talk inside my company. I’m not trying to claim I’m “Billy DevOps”, but I need our company to move in that direction or we will die. While I was preparing for that talk I did some Googling for the common complaints about DevOps talks and training courses, hoping to avoid them, and what I got back was a bunch of people complaining about the heavy focus on “The Principle of Flow”, specifically the automation piece of that.

Take a look at any conference agenda and the DevOps talks are mostly focused on automation, whether that’s builds (Ansible, Terraform, Vagrant, Cloud) or Continuous Integration/Deployment (CI/CD). Automation is certainly a part of DevOps, but DevOps isn’t just automation. So why do people focus on the automation aspect of DevOps so much?

I started off my talk by saying something like this,

“I Googled the common complaints about DevOps talks and training, and most people complained about too much focus on the Principle of Flow and automation. I’m going to do the same thing!”

So why did I come to this conclusion? Well, there are a few reasons.

The principle of feedback relies on you getting that feedback and doing something with it, like improving applications or processes etc. I realise I’m being simplistic, but how can you do anything with that feedback unless you have flow sorted? If it takes you weeks/months/years to effect basic changes because of bad flow, the feedback becomes almost irrelevant. It only serves to demotivate you, as you identify all the problems, with no way of fixing them.

The principle of continual learning and experimentation relies on flow being sorted. If you can’t quickly and reliably build kit and deploy apps to it, how do you expect to be able to experiment and learn new things? I discussed this point in a post called Why Automation Matters : Reducing the Cost of Failure.

It feels like the majority of people I speak to don’t have basic automation sorted yet. In public they talk a good talk, but behind the scenes the processes in their company suck just as bad as ours. Either that, or they have one aspect of automation sorted, which they talk about all the time, forgetting to mention the other manual processes that persist.

Let’s not forget that most of the people I see talking about DevOps come from a technical background, and I suspect are probably more interested in the automation aspects of DevOps than the process side of things. Also, in their current roles they have the ability to influence automation more than they do process change, so they are going to focus on a fight they have a chance of winning.

I think it’s important to emphasise to people that automation isn’t the be-all and end-all of DevOps, but that doesn’t stop it being the fun bit for me. 🙂

Check out the rest of the series here.

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

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