Tag Archives: configuration management

What Makes a Good DevOps Tool?

We had an interesting discussion the other day about what made a “good” DevOps tool.  The assertion is that a good citizen or good “link” in the toolchain has the same basic attributes regardless of the part of the system for which it is responsible. As it turns out, at least with current best practices, this is a reasonably true assertion.  We came up with three basic attributes that the tool had to fit or it would tend to fall out of the toolchain relatively quickly. We got academic and threw ‘popular’ out as a criteria – though supportability and skills availability has to be a factor at some point in the real world. Even so, most popular tools are at least reasonably good in our three categories.

Here is how we ended up breaking it down:

  1. The tool itself must be useful for the domain experts whose area it affects.  Whether it be sysadmins worried about configuring OS images automatically, DBAs, network guys, testers, developers or any of the other potential participants, if the tool does not work for them, they will not adopt it.  In practice, specialists will put up with a certain amount of friction if it helps other parts of the team, but once that line is crossed, they will do what they need to do.  Even among development teams, where automation is common for CI processes, I STILL see shops where they have a source control system that they use day-to-day and then promote from that into the source control system of record.  THe latter was only still in the toolchain due to a bureaucratic audit requirement.
  2. The artifacts the tool produces must be easily versioned.  Most often, this takes the form of some form of text-based file that can be easily managed using standard source control practices. That enables them to be quickly referenced and changes among versions tracked over time. Closed systems that have binary version tracking buried somewhere internally are flat-out harder to manage and too often have layers of difficulty associated with comparing versions and other common tasks. Not that it would have to be a text-based artifact per se, but we had a really hard time coming up with tools that produced easily versioned artifacts that did not just use good old text.
  3. The tool itself must be easy to automate externally.  Whether through a simple API or command line, the tool must be easily inserted into the toolchain or even moved around within the toolchain with a minimum of effort. This allows quickest time to value, of course, but it also means that the overall flow can be more easily optimized or applied in new environments with a minimum of fuss.

We got pretty meta, but these three aspects showed up for a wide variety of tools that we knew and loved. The best build tools, the best sysadmin tools, even stuff for databases had these aspects. Sure, this is proof positive that the idea of ‘infrastructure as code’ is still very valid. The above apply nicely to the most basic of modern IDEs producing source code. But the exercise became interesting when we looked at older versus newer tools – particularly the frameworks – and how they approached the problem. Interestingly we felt that some older, but popular, tools did not necessarily pass the test.  For example, Hudson/Jenkins are weak on #2 and #3 above.  Given their position in the toolchain, it was not clear if it mattered as much or if there was a better alternative, but it was an interesting perspective on what we all regarded as among the best in their space.

This is still an early thought, but I thought I would share the thought to see what discussion it would stimulate. How we look at tools and toolchains is evolving and maturing. A tool that is well loved by a particular discipline but is a poor toolchain citizen may not be the right answer for the overall organization. A close second that is a better overall fit might be a better answer. But, that goes against the common practice of letting the practitioners use what they feel best for their task. What do you do? Who owns that organizational strategic call? We are all going to have to figure that one out as we progress.

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Slides from Agile Austin Talk 2-12-2013

This post slides from my talk at Agile Austin on February 12, 2013.

I want to thank the group for the opportunity and the audience for the great interaction!

Link to slides:  DevOps Beyond the Basics – FINAL

A System for Changing Systems – Part 9

The last capability area in the framework is that of Monitoring. I saved this for last because it is the one that tends to be the most difficult to get right. Of course, commensurate with the difficulty is the benefit gained when it is working properly. A lot of the difficulty and benefit with Monitoring comes from the fact that knowing what to look at, when to look at it and what NOT to look at are only the first steps. It also becomes important to know what distributed tidbits of information to bring together if you actually want a complete picture of your application environment.

Monitoring

Monitoring Capability Area

This post could go for pages – and Monitoring is likely going to be a consuming topic as this series progresses, but for the sake of introduction, lets look at the Monitoring capability area. The sub-capabilities for this area encompass the traditional basics of monitoring Events and Trends among them. The challenge for these two is in figuring out which Events to monitor and sometimes how to get the Event data in the first place. The Trends must then be put into a Report format that resonates with management. It is important to invest in this area in order to build trust with management that the team has control as it tries to increase the frequency of changes – without management’s buy-in, they won’t fund the effort. Finally, the Correlation sub-capability area is related to learning about the application system’s behavior and how changes to some part of the system impacts the other parts. This is an observational knowledge base that must be deliberately built by the team over time so that they can put the Events, Trends, and Reports into the most useful contexts and use the information to better understand risks and priorities when making changes to the system.

A System for Changing Systems – Part 8

The fourth capability area is that of Provisioning. It covers the group of activities for creating all or part of an environment in which an application system can run. This is a key capability for ensuring that application systems have the capacity they need to maintain performance and availability. It is also crucial for ensuring that development and test activities have the capacity they need to maintain THEIR performance. The variance with test teams is that a strong Provisioning capability also ensures that development and test teams can have clean dev/test environments that are very representative of prorduction environments and can very quickly refresh those dev/test environments as needed. The sub-capabilities here deal with managing the consistency of envionment configurations, and then quickly building environments to a known state.

Provisioning Capability Area

Provisioning Capability Area

The fifth capability area is closely related to Provisioning. It is the notion of a System Registry capability. This set of capabilities deals with delivering the assumed infrastructure functions (e.g. DNS, e-mail relays, IP ranges, LDAP, etc.) that surround the environments. These capabilities must be managed in such a way that one or more changes to an application system can be added to a new or existing environment with out significant effort or disruption. In many ways this capability area is the fabric in which the others operate. It can also be tricky to get right because this capability area often spans multiple application systems.

System Registry Capability Area

System Registry Capability Area

A System for Changing Systems – Part 7 – Deployment Capabilities

The third capability area is that of Deployment. Deployment deals with the act of actually putting the changes into a given target environment. It is not prescritive of how this happens. Many shops mechanically deal with deployment via their provisioning system. That is obviously a good thing and an efficiency gain by removing a discrete system for performing deployment activities. It is really a best practice of the most mature organizations. However, this taxonomy model is about identifying the capabilities needed to consistently apply changes to a whole application system. And, lets face it, best practices tend to be transient; as new, even better, best practices emerge.

Deployment Capability Area

Deployment Capability Area

Additionally, there are a number of reasons the capability is included in this taxonomy. First of all, the framework is about capabilities rather than technologies or implementations. It is important to be deliberate about how changes are deployed to all environments and simply because some group of those changes are handled by a provisioning tool does not remove the fact that not all are covered nor does it remove the fact that some deliberate work is expended in fitting the changes into the provisioning tool’s structure. Most provisioning tools, for example are set up to handle standard package mechanisms such as RPM. The deployment activity in that scenario is more one of packaging the custom changes. But the provisioning answer is not necessarily a solution for all four core areas of an applpication system, so there needs to be a capability that deals generically with all of them. Finally, many, if not most, shops have some number of systems where there are legacy technical requirements that require deployment to happen separately.

All of that being true, the term “Deployment” is probably confusing given its history and popular use. It will likely be replaced in the third revision of this taxonomy with something more generic, such as “Change Delivery”.

The sub-category of Asset Repository refers to the fact that there needs to be an ability to maintain a collection of changes that can be applied singly or in bulk to a given application system. In the third revision of the taxonomy, it is likely to be joined by a Packaging sub-capability.  Comments and thoughts are welcome as this taxonomy is evolving and maturing along with the DevOps movement.

A System for Changing Systems – Part 6 – Change Management and Orchestration Capabilities

This post covers the first two capability areas in the system taxonomy. This discussion will begin with where the changes come into the “system for changing systems”, Change Management, and proceed around the picture of top-level capability areas.

The first capability area to look at is Change Management. Change is the fundamental reason for this discussion and, in many ways, the discussion is pointless unless this capability is well understood. Put more simply, you can not apply changes if you do not know what the changes are. As a result, this capability area is the change injector for the system. It is where changes to the four components of the application system are identified, labeled and tracked as they are put into place in each environment. For convenience and in recognition of the fact that changes are injected from both the “new feature” angle as well as from the “maintenance item” angle, the two sources of change are each given their own capability sub-area.

Change Management Capability Area

Change Management Capability Area

The second capability area is that of Orchestration. In a complex system that is maintained by a combination of human and machine-automated prcoesses, understanding what is done, by whom, and in what order is important. This capability area has two sub-areas – one for the technical side and one for the people. This reflects the need to keep the technical dependencies properly managed and also to keep everyone on the same page. Orchestration is a logical extension of the changes themselves. Once you know what the changes are, everyone and everything must stay synchronized on when and where those changes are applied to the application system.

Orchestration Capability Area

Orchestration Capability Area

A System for Changing Systems – Part 5 – Top-level Categories

The first step to understanding the framework is to define the broad, top level capability areas. A very common problem in technology is the frequent over-use of terms that can have radically different meanings depending on the context of a conversation. So, as with any effort to clarify the discussion of a topic, it is very critical to define terms and hold to those definitions during the course of the discussion.

Top level categories of capabilities around various environments in which applications typically must run.

Top level capability areas for sustaining application systems across environments.

At the top level of this framework are six capability groupings

  • Change Management – This category is for capabilities that ensure that changes to the system are properly understood and tracked as they happen. This is a massively overused term, but the main idea for this framework is that managing changes is not the same thing as applying them. Other capabilities deal with that. This capability category is all about oversight.
  • Orchestration – This category deals with the ability to coordinate activity across different components, areas, and technologies in a complex distributed application system in a synchronized manner
  • Deployment – This category covers the activities related to managing the lifecycles of an application systems’ artifacts through the various environments. Put more simply this area deals with the mechanics of actually changing out pieces of an application system.
  • Monitoring – The monitoring category deals with instrumenting the environment for various purposes. This instrumentation concept covers all pieces of the application system and provides feedback in the appropriate manner for interested stakeholders. For example, capacity usage for operations and feature usage for development.
  • System Registry – This refers to the need for a flexible and well-understood repository of shared information about the infrastructure in which the application system runs. This deals with the services on which the application system depends and which may need to be updated before a new instance of the application system can operate correctly.
  • Provisioning – This capability is about creating and allocating the appropriate infrastructure resources for an instance of the application system to run properly. This deals with the number and configuration of those resources. While this area is related to deployment, it is separate because in many infrastructures it may not be desireable or even technically possible to provision fresh resources with each deployment and linking the two would blunt the relevancy of the framework.

The next few posts will dig into the sub-categories underneath each of these top-level items.