Companies may not be ready for DevOps at All!

DevOps is everywhere, its everybody talking about and like any hype has lots of people getting it so wrong. So DevOps is not a process, its not a tool its not a department is not a tool is not a specific technology. DevOps is about culture - how to you build and operate high scalable systems.  DevOps for me IMHO is a LEAN manifestation so its really needs be based on LEAN thinking and principles - At least i see this pattern a lot, lots of company that gets devops right are doing LEAN i dont think is a coincidence.  Unfortunately more and more companies are trying to make devops simple, easy, predictable and so scheduled, like in how many months and i be devops? 2 months?

The DevOps Team 

That`s the first and one of the most errors i see everywhere. You dont fix silos issues creating more silos - not at all. So before people might blame dev or might blame ops - but now people will blame the devops team so this is really just moving the problem to another place. Companies already have dev and already have ops so they need make this guys work together as a unit not as a shared structure everybody has.

Automation/Cloud 

It`s easy people associate devops with a set of technologies but thats not the case. Today automation is a must and makes lots of sense use a public cloud but however devops is a bigger concept than this and you can say you do because because you use amazon and have puppet or chef there. This is just modern ops with is valuable but is not enought.

Fragility

Architecture and software need do ant-fragile so thats it not just about a single technology but also related to several principles around how to build and operate more intelligent applications. Stuff like 12 Factor App could help you out. Thats require lots of maturity and it will require lots of care how you build and operate your apps - so this is very different for standard development most of companies do. Because they dont really care how they build software and this all gonna need change, how you log matters, how you expose configs matter and lots of other things.

Proper SOA / API Governance

SOA has a big role as well. Because you cant have a architecture that does not scala and dont provide flexibility so you will really need have SOA/Microservices/Apis thats is a must. Because that provides lots of flexibility and is not just have a service with a rest interface that way you design the interface matters(not in the REST purist discussion) but in sense of governance because there are ways you can avoid braking the consumers - there are ways that you can make your life easier or harder.

New Practices old Mindsets - Give me benefits with not change!

The reality is that everybody wants devops but people really dont want change, they all want benefits but they are okay to stick with new technology and practices like automation but companies are not there yet, several companies still have lots of waterfall and PMO doing very old management that dont creates quality and dont provide flexibility and speed for the business. So if you are not agile, could you be devops? Are you being DevOps or just using docker and doing Chef?

A long way ahead...

There are still lots of work that needs to be done at the market in general. Most of companies never got SOA and Agile right so moving to devops is actually more challenges and without changing mindsets is really hard. The good news is that  some companies got agile, got soa right and guess what they are doing devops properly - so this are driving forces pushing the others to improve.

Cheers,
Diego Pacheco

Popular posts from this blog

Kafka Streams with Java 15

Image
Kafka Streams is a Streaming library similar to Spark and Flink which works with Apache Kafka. Kafka stream can be useful to process historical and near-real-time big data workloads but also for non-realtime analytical computations at scale for the online world as well. Kafka-Streams is elastic, highly scalable, fault-tolerant, and fully integrated with Kafka. You can use Kafka Stream with Java, Scala, Kotlin JVM applications and also have exactly-once processing semantics. Kafka-Streams is being used by the New York Times, Pinterest, Line, Trivago, Zalando, and many other companies. Today I want to share a video of Kafka-Streams running with Kafka 2.6 and Java JDK 15. So Let's get started. 
read more »

Rust and Java Interoperability

Image
Rust does not stop for one second to amaze me. It looks like Rust was designed to talk to every other language so easily. No kidding, it's clear way Web Assembly and rust have lots in common. Java is never an easy lang to interop with. Today I will show how easily we can interop Java & Rust. In order to do so, we will need to use the Java and Rust compilers. For Java, we will not require any other lib than the standard JDK. For Rust, we will need to create a lib project in cargo and we will need to use the crate JNI. I love this feature because java does not allow low-level code on the main language. So if we need to do something low level, efficiently Rust is my first choice, not only for safety reasons but because is really fast.  Let's get started.
read more »

HMAC in Java

Image
In 2018 AWS CTO(Vogels) said : "Security is everyone's job". For the last 2 years, there was so many famous and big data leaks and breaks that made that statement be very true more than ever. Security often could mean worst performance and worst user experience so in order to get it right you really need to think about the designs before jumping into to code and consider performance and user experience has main requirements.  I was thinking about writing about how to do HMAC in Java for a while and recently Redis 6.0.0 come out and to my surprise, there was a refactoring on the password part in order to use HMAC.  Security easily could scare engineers often because it is not something well spread yet but I believe this will change soon. It does not matter if you have to deal with PII Data or not, security is super relevant because everybody is running their workloads at the cloud or with IoT and Edge devices which means more distribution, more code, more points of fail
read more »