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DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

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Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#101

Post by xuancanh »

Chico75 wrote: post #40
robertlagrant wrote: post #4

This article is highlighting a problem with badly designed maturity models in general. If you have a good maturity model (e.g. for DevOps one based on DORA metrics) then the capabilities needed to arrive at a higher level can be determined per-org. That solves the real problem. I think the article has a fundamental "AB problem" issue.

I would encourage you to read the book "Accelerate" which was at the source of the DORA metrics, as it clearly advocate for a capability model, not a maturity one.

The article is basically a summary of the book "Accelerate." The main issue with the book is the conclusions about the connection between DORA metrics and team's performance; these four metrics might not actually cause the success of the "high-performers" in the survey. The book literally shows that when companies learn about these metrics, they can improve them but not always their performance. The research method, based only on surveys, is also questionable.

While I think it's an interesting read, we should take it with a grain of salt.

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#102

Post by Leo_Germond »

morelisp wrote: post #87
mjr00 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DevOps as a movement died when it started being used as a job title. In my experience, it quickly stopped being a philosophy for Dev and Ops teams to work on working better together and just because a new name for System Administrator. The "DevOps" job title can arguably just be a sysadmin, but I do think the main ideals of the movement are just so tightly ingrained in software now that we don't even notice. It's e…

Your optimism is refreshing but ultimately wrong. We did "solve" those problems but then immediately 10xd the incidental complexity of both our development and operations work in exchange for nothing.

I'm not sure where this 10x comes from but if this is about modern on-demand CI clustered runners vs old timey dedicated hardware and servers, then you have to take into account the fact that those hardware and servers were never properly cleaned of their mess, hard to configure, and had low general availability. This switch was a big gain IMO, even if docker and k8s are far from being simple to operate.

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#103

Post by Leo_Germond »

samsquire wrote: post #12
hendry wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely Github workflows https://github.com/actions/starter-workflows or Gitlab templates is the culmination of your devops work? Not Kubernetes (?) unless I missed something. The rewarding thing for me is applying this and other sensible defaults like observing iteration speed and driving delivery..

I'm imagining something similar to a 3D wireframe model of networks and systems, with particles that move around between nodes that represent requests or IOPS. Circuit breakers, bottlenecks, IOPs, load shedding, traffic behaviours can all be visualised. I'm not sure how you would represent latency with this visualization but that's also important. It more represents throughput. Can also be used to represent human wor…

Well you could use some heatmap to represent latency, where the hottest part would be those of high latency, turn those particles and boxes red or blue depending on their mean latency...

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#104

Post by Leo_Germond »

toyg wrote: post #34
galleywest200 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is nebulous. My title is DevOps. I do a lot of SysAdmin work, but I also work escalated tickets, write automation and integrations, read the flagship code bases when errors occur, I complain about the flagship code bases when bugs occur, and I file JIRA tickets about the flagship code bases when bugs occur -- but I do not write code for the flagship product. I think that is a key.

> but I do not write code for the flagship product. I think that is a key. Basically you clean up after big-shot devs, got it.

That view of the development process is a bit reductive, I'm not sure the dev working on fixing a regression on some crusty, old, ugly, but contractually maintained branch of the product considers itself to be a big shot. But that's where most of the money comes from, so that's where this function has to act. Maintenance caused by unprovoked changes is not the lot of any single person or job in the company, it is in fact probably the most common facet of any tech job.

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#105

Post by robertlagrant »

simplotek wrote: post #11
robertlagrant wrote: post #4

This article is highlighting a problem with badly designed maturity models in general. If you have a good maturity model (e.g. for DevOps one based on DORA metrics) then the capabilities needed to arrive at a higher level can be determined per-org. That solves the real problem. I think the article has a fundamental "AB problem" issue.

> If you have a good maturity model (e.g. for DevOps one based on DORA metrics) then the capabilities needed to arrive at a higher level can be determined per-org. How do metrics like deployment frequency and lead time for changes can have an impact on "the capabilities needed" by an org? Honestly, your comment reads a bit like machine learning generated buzzword bingo.

> How do metrics like deployment frequency and lead time for changes can have an impact on "the capabilities needed" by an org?

Hitting tighter metrics is going to need more advanced capabilities.

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#106

Post by Karellen »

dogleash wrote: post #90
Karellen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, being in DevOps is like being a SysAdmin, except you write code to automate as much of your job as possible. ...so, exactly like being a SysAdmin.

A quip I liked when devops was new was “devops means checking your scripts into version control”

After some further consideration, the thought occurred to me that "devops means writing your scripts in any language other than perl"

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#107

Post by dijit »

galleywest200 wrote: post #26
a_c wrote: post #14

What is devops here again? Is it the The Phoenix Project one on one extreme or system admin for the cloud on the other extreme?

It really is nebulous. My title is DevOps. I do a lot of SysAdmin work, but I also work escalated tickets, write automation and integrations, read the flagship code bases when errors occur, I complain about the flagship code bases when bugs occur, and I file JIRA tickets about the flagship code bases when bugs occur -- but I do not write code for the flagship product. I think that is a key.

Sounds dreadfully similar to what sysadmins were doing 15 years ago.

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#108

Post by dijit »

jayd16 wrote: post #56

Is the tl;dr just to do your devops in an agile way? I can't seem to pull anything else out of this.

DevOps as she is written originally was “Agile Systems Administration”. So, yes.

Any other variation is not what Patrick Debois was talking about when he created DevOps days, from which the job title takes its name.

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#109

Post by getoffmyyawn »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #98
getoffmyyawn wrote: post #42

DevOps as a movement died when it started being used as a job title. In my experience, it quickly stopped being a philosophy for Dev and Ops teams to work on working better together and just because a new name for System Administrator. Before the popularity of the term "DevOps" it was always true that any System Administrator worth hiring knew how to script for automation (the job title for people who didn't was Syst…

What do you call the people who: - Use Terraform to build infrastructure as code - Get involve in containerising applications - Run and operate Kubernetes - Spend a lot of time on CI/CD - Improve the development experience - Implement service discovery - Build and run developer platforms - (To a lesser extent) Build and run cloud environments including Serverless components This seems like a new set of responsibiliti…

Personally, I call this job role System Engineer.

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#110

Post by KingOfCoders »

mjr00 wrote: post #44
getoffmyyawn wrote: post #42

DevOps as a movement died when it started being used as a job title. In my experience, it quickly stopped being a philosophy for Dev and Ops teams to work on working better together and just because a new name for System Administrator. Before the popularity of the term "DevOps" it was always true that any System Administrator worth hiring knew how to script for automation (the job title for people who didn't was Syst…

> DevOps as a movement died when it started being used as a job title. In my experience, it quickly stopped being a philosophy for Dev and Ops teams to work on working better together and just because a new name for System Administrator. The "DevOps" job title can arguably just be a sysadmin, but I do think the main ideals of the movement are just so tightly ingrained in software now that we don't even notice. It's e…

I do think CI/CD and automatic deployment made the difference. Coming from copying a Zip file to a server, to deploying a WAR, to having release trains wit dedicated ops teams most of my CTO coachees now have automatic deployments and ops teams mostly for monitoring, incident management and capability planning.

Many struggle with "if you build it, you operate it" because many developers don't want to be on pager duty.

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