Follow The Thought Leaders In #DevOps

PLEASE NOTE THIS IS AN ARCHIVED POST - Netuitive has since become Metricly, and the tool has matured greatly since the time this was written!

Development & Operations – Strange bedfellows shaping the future of business critical applications and services

Much has been written about what DevOps is … and what it is not. For some, DevOps is about inherently different development and operations folks coming together to collaborate more closely and leverage best practices for managing automation and cloud applications. They covet agility based on continuous integration, accelerating code development, and product releases. They live under a fundamental mantra of “build, test deploy.”

For others, DevOps is more about what DevOps is not. They are vocal in their opinions that DevOps is not a “job title,” that it is not about solving a particular IT issue or problem, that it is not a software tool, and that it is not just about “continuous integration.”

But all agree that DevOps is NOT going away.

And while large and small enterprises are starting to recognize how DevOps is at the heart of transformational changes taking place in product and service delivery, DevOps continues to be ill-defined. Articles and opinions tend to be varied sometimes bordering on convoluted. To learn more, seek out the true DevOps thought leaders. Twitter can make it easy to identify who they are – but only if you’re following the right people. To gain better insight, start following these 10 DevOps gurus:

@patrickdebois — Widely considered the godfather of the DevOps movement, Patrick Debois is known for contending that DevOps is a “human problem” and most DevOps folks agree.

@botchagalupe — John Willis is a DevOps thought leader and IT guru with the kind of wide ranging background that no corporate bio will do justice. You probably don’t know DevOps until you know @botchagalupe.

@jesserobbins – Jesse Robbins is founder of Chef (formerly Opscode) which makes software that automates internet servers & infrastructure for companies like Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. More recently he founded @onbeep where they create beautiful wearable devices to change the world. He also founded the Velocity Conference and helped start the DevOps movement.

@RealGeneKim — Gene Kim is a big DevOps enthusiast and co-author of the must read, “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win.” He also wrote The DevOps Cookbook” which provides prescriptive steps to replicate what “high performing DevOps organizations” have done that results in their extraordinary performance outcomes. Both are the culmination of over 13 years of researching both high-performing and low-performing IT organizations, as well as benchmarking over 1500 IT organizations to help inform what behaviors simultaneously advance business and information security objectives.

@jezhumble — Jez Humble is co-author of Continuous Delivery. His professional experience is in IT as a developer, systems administrator, trainer, consultant, manager, and speaker. He tends to tweet on software, innovation, social and economic justice.

@allspaw — John Allspaw is the SVP of Tech Operations at Etsy. He is the author of The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources. His professional focus is on building web operations teams and capacity planning for large-scale infrastructure projects. Data center operations, high availability, disaster recovery and general Business Continuity Planning.

@haightspeech — Cameron Haight is the pre-eminent DevOps thought leader at Gartner. He focuses on DevOps and associated technologies, processes and organizational structures. He has also developed the concept of web-scale IT, which seeks to enable enterprises to develop capabilities typically found only in large cloud services providers, such as Amazon and Google.

@damonedwards — Damon Edwards is co-founder of DTO Solutions, a frequent conference speaker and contributor to the dev2ops.org blog. He focuses on DevOps and operational process topics for software-as-a-service, e-commerce, and cloud businesses. He has been actively involved organizing DevOps Days conferences and co-hosting the DevOps Cafe podcast.

@littleidea — Andrew Clay Shafer is co-founder of Puppet Labs and is a big DevOps evangelist. As VP of Engineering for Cloudscaling he led teams that implemented some of the largest CloudStack and OpenStack deployments. He organized the first Puppet Camp and has been active in Devops Days in Silicon Valley, Agile Roots, and a variety of Ignite events.

@mjasay — Matt Asay is vice president of business development and corporate strategy at MongoDB, Inc. He has been heavily involved in open-source software and the trends it has spawned. He lists specialties as Open Source, Big Data, NoSQL, MongoDB, real-time analytics, HTML5, and Linux, software. Asay is an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and earned his juris doctorate at Stanford, where he focused on open source and other IP licensing issues.

From Metricly’s perspective, it’s obvious that automation is at the heart of the DevOps value chain. What may be less obvious is how intelligent IT analytics becomes increasingly important as IT initiatives start to scale beyond the limitations of human interpretation of more heterogeneous environments being monitored. The process breaks down when crucial apps are suddenly not available due to infrastructure and applications problems that cannot be identified. Particularly in large organizations, automation of problem isolation and ease of use are still the most important qualities in tools that solve DevOps problems.

To learn more about monitoring and automation, check out a new breed of IT analytics being deployed by the world’s largest enterprises — – financial institutions, global wireless and telecommunications firms, large retail and payment systems. If you have less time, here is a short two-minute introduction.