This blog contains my thoughts, observations, musings, and ramblings about the complexities involved in delivering software solutions.  There is a revolution underway in the way that this is done.  A rediscovery, I would say, that we all have to work together to make it happen for our organizations.  Unfortunately, our organizations have grown up around an older way of doing things and are structurally partitioned into ‘silos’ that over-specialize people’s roles.  The convergence of the speed of the marketplace, Agile software development, and the complexity of modern software infrastructure have exposed the fact that the common, specialized approaches are no longer tenable and must be replaced if organizations are to execute as quickly as they need to.  Of course, that’s where the real fun begins…

Whether you choose to apply a buzz-term, such as DevOps, to the movement that is trying to change things or not, I believe the change is inevitable.  A crustier stance would simply say that this is a return to ‘good old-fashioned execution’ or point to old aphorisms about everyone having to row the boat in the same direction.  In the end, the aphorisms and buzz-terms endure because they have the element of truth in them that we have to get it done better, faster, and cheaper if we are to compete and survive.  That is the core of business; and a competitive market simply does not tolerate inefficiency over time.

I have been fortunate enough to have been involved in this movement since the middle of 2006 when I went to work for a company that sold a distributed orchestration system that helped customers rapidly iterate on their software delivery cycles.  We developed a terrific customer list of very large corporations and were subsequently acquired by a very large technology vendor where we took the business into even more segments and even larger customers.  I have been evangelizing the term “DevOps” since I first heard it in 2009, drew a picture of two overlapping triangles as a visualization, and then used the visualization to evangelize the potential benefits to the company and our customers a our annual user conference.

Hopefully, if you are reading this, you will find what I have written useful and helpful.  Please do comment – the value of these things is really in the interaction they can stimulate.

Obligatory disclaimer:  This blog represents my personal views and does not in any way represent the views of my employer, my customers, or anyone else.