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  • Meet Dave. Dave works for a company whose success is contingent on its ability to offer

  • new and exciting products to its online customers faster than competitors. Dave is a developer,

  • who writes code for new products, new features, security updates and bug fixes. Unfortunately,

  • he needs to wait weeks for his work to be placed into production.

  • This delay increases the pressure of staying competitive, because some competitors are

  • able to deploy new products and features much faster.

  • In addition, the delay makes it very challenging for Dave to manage both the code that is pending

  • to be pushed into production and the development of the next product and/or feature that he

  • is responsible for producing.

  • When DaveÕs code is finally deployed into the production environment, occasionally unforeseen

  • errors or problems occur. This mostly happens because Dave is focused on writing code for

  • his Development Environment and itÕs not identical to the Production Environment.

  • Meet DaveÕs coworker Anna! SheÕs a System Administrator from the Operations team. She

  • is responsible for maintaining and assuring the uptime of the Production Environment.

  • The number of servers that she needs to administer is constantly growing because her company

  • continues to launch new products and customers are consuming more of their services. This

  • increase of servers has caused some challenges for Anna. The tools that she used to administer

  • a few servers are not as effective when used to administer a much larger volume of servers.

  • This challenge affects how new code is deployed in her production environment. Usually when

  • new code is released it takes a little massaging to fit into her environment. This is why she

  • requires code deployments to be scheduled and are only allowed once a month.

  • Once the new code is actually deployed, itÕs her responsibility to diagnoses any errors

  • or problems caused by the changes. Sometimes to her it feels as though the Developers have

  • tossed their work over the wall to her and her team.

  • So, What can be done to help Dave and Anna work better? Ultimately, they want the same

  • thing,,,, happy customers!

  • What if Dave the Developer and Anna from Operations * Worked better together?

  • * Thought more alike? * Broke down silos?

  • * Shared responsibilities?

  • This would require them to change their mindset on how DEV and Ops work?

  • So, what is DevOps? Devops integrates developers and operations

  • teams in order to improve collaboration and productivity, by automating infrastructure,

  • automating workflows and continuously measuring application performance.

  • If AnnaÕs and DaveÕs teams were more DevOps oriented, they would do a few things differently.

  • They would place more focus on automation. DevOps teams try to automate everything: from

  • testing of new code to how infrastructure is provisioned.

  • They would write software in small chunks that are integrated, tested, monitored and

  • deployed usually in hours, versus the traditional way of writing large chunks of software over

  • weeks or months to then do weeks or months of testing. Plus they will have identical

  • development and production environments based on same configurations.

  • Writing small chunks of software will allow them to increase the frequency of the deployments

  • and improve the time to deploy new code.

  • It also enables them to adopt an iterative process to monitor, measure and improve the

  • code and operations every day. Improve their ability to respond to market needs, or other

  • things that impact software.

  • Instead of building and configuring software plus infrastructure manually on an ad-hoc

  • basis, AnnaÕs and DaveÕs teams would write Configuration Management Code that describes

  • how things should be built. As a result: they will have the ability to build infrastructure

  • at scale to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of servers), in multiple locations, using

  • different types of hardware.

  • Another change that a DevOps oriented team would do, is to use a source control system

  • to help manage and document all of the changes to both the Application Code and Configuration

  • Management Code.

  • The change that Anna and Dave would implement is to adopt a discipline of application performance

  • monitoring and optimization in almost real-time. This will allow Dave and the rest of his developers

  • to understand the performance impact of their changes. The ultimate goal is to have a Production

  • Environment that gives their customers a great experience.

  • So what benefits does having a DevOps oriented team give AnnaÕs and DaveÕs company? Well,

  • it allows them to increase the rate of Software Delivery and improves the companyÕs ÒTime

  • to MarketÓ potentially from Months and Weeks to Days and Hours. This will be a huge competitive

  • advantage. It also allows them to maintain better Business Focus by automating their

  • infrastructure so they can focus things that improve the business and their online content.

  • They will spend more time of the things that add more value to their organizations

  • When a company is able to build and offer better products, this means they have happier

  • customers, and happier developers.

  • How does a DevOps oriented team actually accomplish this? Well as mentioned before, a culture

  • change is needed, or changes in the mindsets of the two groups that need to work closer

  • together. The other component to the formula is getting the right tools. New tools are

  • needed in this new fast pace world.

  • They will need a tool that allows them to test their code and programs. An example of

  • this is Jenkins.

  • They will need a tool for Source Control such as GiTHub. This will allow them to manage

  • and document all the changes to their Application Code and their Configuration Management Code.

  • They will need tools for Configuration Management, such as Chef, puppet and Saltstack. These

  • tools will allow them to deploy applications in an automated fashion, maybe across hundred

  • or thousands of servers in different locations.

  • They will also need new tools that allow them to continuously measure the performance of

  • their environment. Generating, reading and analyzing system logs is extremely helpful

  • to monitor an environment; but now that many environments have hundreds or thousands of

  • servers, new tools like new relic are required to make sense on all the data.

  • This will allow them to know how the entire application is performing and identify bottlenecks.

  • But many companies donÕt know how to use these new tools or do not have the skills

  • to automate software delivery process. This is where Rackspace DevOps Automation Service

  • can help.

  • In Conclusion, DevOps is a new philosophy that can help software organizations innovate

  • faster and be more responsive to business needs. It promotes collaboration between developers

  • and operations, which improves quality or software deployments, and more frequent software

  • releases. Adopting the DevOps philosophy requires a new mindset, new tools and new skills.

  • Rackspace can help. Learn more at www.rackspace.com/DevOps

Meet Dave. Dave works for a company whose success is contingent on its ability to offer

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