In my first DevOps post, I discussed why DevOps isn’t the technology equivalent of Donny Most (Ralph Malph of Happy Days) with his fistful of chocolate and Robby Benson with his jar labeled “Peanut Butter,” crashing into each other in front of the corner “Paper Back Books” store (talk about another era - you can see the video here).
But if you define a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup by its slogan “Two great tastes that taste great together,” then the real Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of this whole DevOps movement may be the combination of DevOps with the Cloud, rather than portions of these various ingredients.
In a recent post for Silicon Angle, Zenoss CTO Alan Conley calls DevOps and CloudOps the emerging IT model:
Both DevOps and Cloud are high on the hype curve right now and for good reason. DevOps is popular because it promotes agility by moving application responsibility closer to the business need. Cloud, whether public or private, also promotes agility by providing standard services through automation. At Zenoss, we’ve noticed that these are two sides of the same coin – success in one drives success with the other.
Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies explains that Cloud plays a big part in enabling developers to take ownership of their applications because a cloud environment lets developers throw up virtual machines that the operations team have already designed as sandboxes and that will not affect production environments:
One of the drivers of virtualization and cloud is the application team [being able to] say, “I can build a new [virtual] machine myself, set up my Dev environment, and then when I’m confident I have something real to do, I can then go to operations.”
But given that DevOps is primarily about aligning operations teams with business goals, Ops, not surprisingly, needs access to the same, if not higher, levels of agility in a DevOps environment that developer teams are driving toward.
So I was pleased to read Floyd’s post, The IT Operations Manifesto: Grabbing the Torch from IBM Tivoli Netcool, particularly its opening paragraph:
We declare that IT Operations will no longer take a back seat to other disciplines within Cloud computing and will rise to accept the challenges of managing this new complex world.
Nothing like throwing down the gauntlet to bring all these great tastes together! #netfool indeed…
