Voice of the DBA

Tag: DevOps

  • Why DevOps? Employee Satisfaction

    DevOps is being embraced by more and more companies, but still a minority of organizations that perform software development. There are plenty of software developers, project managers, and operational staff that are comfortable with their own process, even as they may struggle to produce software for their customers. I think DevOps is a better way to build software, and today I want to look at a benefit beyond faster releases. Today, let’s talk employee satisfaction.

    The State of DevOps report shows that companies who have implemented a DevOps process have more engaged and happier employees. According to the eNPS (e Net Promoter Score), the employees are more likely to continue to work there, and recommend the company to their friends. That endorsement of the organization comes with two benefits. Employees are more productive, and they bring other good employees to work. After all, how many employees recommend someone they don’t want to work with or don’t think can do the job?

    More deployments, easier deployments, the ability to get your code used by customers while you still remember how it works. These are the keys to helping employees enjoy their jobs. When employees are more engaged, and when they are satisfied with their jobs, they work in a more focused manner, trying to ensure their work produces results that help others in the company. In other words, more valuable code.

    DevOps isn’t new; it’s a name given to a number of productive, effective practices that the best software developers have been following for years. The idea of DevOps is being more and more widely embraced, resulting in better software, along with happier employees.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • DevOps Isn’t Perfect

    I saw a post recently from Grant Fritchey, Help Me, Help You, Deliver DevOps. In it, Grant shows that DevOps isn’t making developers do everything, it isn’t just giving developers more responsibility, and it isn’t developers handling some of the operational staff responsibilities. It’s about getting development and operations to work together. Hence, DevOps, not DEVops, or Dev    ops.

    In the post, Grant also links to some fundamental failures from companies that supposedly have adopted DevOps processes. Companies like Gitlab and Amazon. There are plenty more examples, which certainly make some people question whether DevOps is better than other methods of building and deploying software.  How are the VSTS issues different from the Knight Capital debacle?

    In some sense, they aren’t. In many cases, we’ve had a software issue that affected customers. People were upset, services weren’t delivered, and it’s entirely possible that revenue was lost. However, one of the things that I think differentiates DevOps is that developers and operational staff can troubleshoot and determine a root cause much quicker. Since the entire commit, build, test, release pipeline is instrumented and documented, your staff can quickly determine what new items might have caused an issue. If it’s not a new item, they can also quickly determine if that’s the case.

    However, once you’ve placed your system in production, DevOps doesn’t ensure that your HA (High Availability) or DR (Disaster Recovery) preparations are adequate. Those are still the responsibility of your Ops staff, but by using DevOps, and storing configuration as code and provisioning your systems in all environments the same, hopefully you’ve taken advantage of this to actually ensure you have tested some HA or DR features in an environment outside of production.

    However, DevOps isn’t prescriptive advice. DevOps isn’t a particular process or a tool that you use or install. DevOps is about learning and improving over time. For different companies, this means you’ll be at a different stage in your DevOps maturity than other companies. Some have complete deployment processes, but limited instrumentation and monitoring in production. Some have tons of data and deploy code perfectly, but no HA. Some have great HA, but poor deployment processes.

    DevOps is about constant improvement and advancement to make your software development (Dev) and deployment (Dev and Ops) and monitoring/management (Ops) better over time. This might not prevent human error, or even code bugs, but DevOps should mean you make fewer mistakes, less often, and learn from them to avoid repeating those issues.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.7MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • DevOps Webinar Tomorrow

    A quick reminder that tomorrow, Feb 21 at 12pm EST, I’ll be hosting another DevOps, Database Lifecycle Management (DLM) webinar. Together with Arneh Eskandari, we’ll show how we can each make changes to our own database, push the changes to git and reconcile merge issues.

    Register now, and watch us work together to perform distributed database development.

  • Why Devops? For Better Security

    The ideas of DevOps are a mixture of principles, ideas, recommendations, tools, processes, attitudes, and more. There isn’t any  one way to implement a DevOps process, and plenty of people have been working in what many would consider a DevOps environment without calling it that. I really like Donovan Brown’s definition: “DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users.”

    That sums it up nicely, but what are some of the “value” items that we can deliver to our customers? Today I want to discuss one of these: security.

    The historical view of a secure system is one that gets secured, rarely changes, and every change allowed is reviewed to ensure no mistakes are made. That view fits fine in a DevOps software pipeline, well, except the rare part. Does that make a DevOps built application less secure? Let’s turn that around. Is a traditional (waterfall, agile, etc.) application more secure because of the limitations?

    I’d argue it’s not. One of the issues with security is that the issues, holes, and vulnerabilities constantly change. What was secure last week might not be secure this week. In traditional applications we find one of two things. Since deployments are relatively rare, security problems often remain un-patched for long periods of time, or they are patched quickly by changes to production systems that are not well tested or evaluated. There are countless tales of changes made to production applications that end up breaking the system and must be removed. The result, a less secure system. This can be especially problematic when dependent software, for example the OpenSSL issues, is not patched because there are so many dependencies that no one is willing to change the system for fear of causing downtime.

    In a mature DevOps environment, the system is better understood because the software is regularly built, testing is automated, and there are regular deployments to various downstream environments. Security patches can be incorporated and deployed quickly, enabling the ability of our automated testing process and intermediate environments to look for potential issues. With a regular branching strategy, we can even quickly suspend current development and focus on producing a patch or changing other code to ensure a successful deployment. Because we practice regular deployments, the need for un-tested, cowboy code changes in production is eliminated.

    Certainly a DevOps process doesn’t preclude making mistakes. It doesn’t ensure developers or administrators won’t create vulnerabilities (intentional or accidental). DevOps doesn’t prevent mistakes. DevOps does ask us to continually learn and get feedback from our efforts. And it asks that we incorporate that feedback into our process. If we find a problem in how we write code, a test missed, or a problem in deployment, we correct that in our automated process to prevent it happening again. And since every task, every build, every deployment is logged, we can audit everyone’s actions. DevOps certainly encourages more security, though not perfect security. The goal is that a DevOps process gets us a little better security every time we learn something.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 5.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.