Four Cornerstones of DevOps

Brad Burrows: Discusses the Four Cornerstones of DevOps with Bailey Caldwell

The IT Industry continues to gather pace. The ability to manage and handle change, frequently delivering new features and functions to market, is a critical enabler for any business to compete in today's market place. The DevOps movement is really about maturing processes and bringing the ops and dev teams together so that we can do that fast process of delivery. (Agile) Technically though, I believe it takes four cornerstone capabilities that must exist to do DevOps well. The first is that you must be able to automate the provisioning of your infrastructure fast. Secondly, you must get your CI/CD toolsets in place (eg. Jenkins) so that you can control the delivery pipeline. Third is you need to have Automated Testing in place (eg. Selenium) so that you can automate the testing and know when there is an issue prior to going into production. I believe log analysis tools are the Fourth Cornerstone Capability. The sort of tools (eg. AppDynamics, SumoLogic, Dynatrace) that can help you identify root cause issues early enough in the pipeline so they don't get released into production.

Bailey Caldwell: Explains the concept of Pets and Cattle

Traditional IT is thought of as a pet like a kitten. You want to feed it. You want it to grow. You don't ever want it to go away. It needs to be nurtured and cared for. But the 'cloud' is more like cattle. You slaughter it. You eat the meat and you grow a new one. It's a very different mindset. It's really about not respecting the inalienable rights of the server and the system. We're treating them like cattle and actually moving through them as though they are disposable, which is ultimately what we do in the cloud.