From Dev to DevOps to ...

For the past two years, I've been telling to people during interviews, we don't do ops. Since this week, I can't say it anymore! We deployed in production an application and we are running ops!

From Dev to DevOps

Everyone has heard, one way or another, about DevOps. For top management, most of the time, is a good way to remove a team (ops) and have the dev team do it.

But the definition on the Wikipedia page, is a bit different. The one I like has been wrote by Len Bass, Ingo Weber, and Liming Zhu:

a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality

So what does it mean for the team as of last week ?

Things that will not change

We will still be in direct contact with the business trying to understand and propose simple solutions. Simple solutions are key as they should be simple to : implement + operate + use + fix.

Therefore, our methodology based on Agile / Scrum is still key for us to create a lean path between an idea and having it live.

Things that are new: ensuring high quality

Quality doesn't happen out of thin air, a developer as to work on it and really know its application on the production environment. To do so, he must track at least:

• Up time: If the system (server or application) is not up, we have to stop what ever we are doing to fix this.
• Physical Constraints: The application is installed on physical machine (with VMs or Dockers). It has limitation that will impact your environment (VM or Docker), it is important to track them IO / CPU / Memory / Network Usage. Do we have a bottleneck somewhere? What is the average load? When do we have a peak? (and Why? but this one is for the business)
• Web Application: How many connections per XXX? How many business actions per XXX? Those are very important because sometime an application can be "up" but inaccessible or broken (network or software issues). So how long will you wait between sells, for instance, if you have an e-shop, before worrying?
• Performance: No one likes to wait for a web-page to load NO MATTER what. If you don't have any KPI to track facts, people will have to feel the improvement and those feeling will lead to complaints. How long key pages / web-services takes to load? To signup, to process a cart, to select add a new product, to acknowledge the cart in the back-office... (never forget about the back-office)
• Application Logs: When a developer code, he will put a lot of logs, with different levels. Once in production, some adjustment needs to be made. In addition, end users will use the application in a way that was not imagine. It is important to track, recurring errors to fix them permanently and your logs clean.
• DB Logs: NEVER NEVER NEVER forget about those one. In case of performance issue ALWAYS start from DB (missing indexes, query too complicated...). Once a month, every developer should look at the slow queries and missing indexes logs to improve the DB.

Doing all of this can take a lot of time to a developer, but not doing it, will cost a lot more when (not if) an issue will happen once in production.

From DevOps to NoOps

"Developers are the laziest people in the world!" This is what I keep telling everyone. Their job is to automatize their work and other people's tasks. Having them do DevOps is just a step toward "NoOps"... To achieve it, today, it is complicated as there is no clear definition of it (no wikipedia page). What we know, is that we need to build our web application differently, using new tools, new approach ...