After DevOpsDays Minneapolis, I reflected on some of the feedback and what we learned from it
I'm not sure if devops has reached peak buzzword, but there definitely are plenty.
Here's some of the jargon and references you'll hear at devopsdays.
Unicorns are magical super special companies that do everything we all wish we could do including many deploys a day; horses are the more typical organization.
Silos are a metaphor describing team isolation from each other.
"Worked fine in dev; ops problem now" meme.
Kevin Behr discussed respiratory permeability.
Michael Ducy (pictured) talks in Amsterdam about goats in terms of venturing forth from silos to share information, and in Brisbane about owls in terms of listening and learning.
Thought leadership is nonsense. Plenty of people have interesting things to say in this space, and I'll quote a number of them in this talk, but they aren't more right than you. We're all figuring this out. If you're listening to this, thinking about it, and planning on going back to your org and driving change, then you're a "thought leader".
We talk about software, platform, infrastructure as a service, and some people joke about everything else ever as a service. Like sadness as a service if you're using EBS or any storage in the cloud.
John Willis named the four pillars of devops as culture, automation, measurement, and sharing. We're mostly talking about culture here, but the other three matter also.
While "devops engineer" sounds about as ridiculous as "agile engineer", if you have devops in your title, you're not doing devops wrong. People might deride it, and they're right that it's a silly title, but you aren't silly or wrong.
If this all seems intimidating and like more than you bargained for, it's really okay. It's going to be fine. You are the right person in the right place at the right time.
It's really easy to feel alone at these things. But you attended for a reason: the people. You can read blog posts and watch videos alone at home. You can meet people here. Based on the show of hands, almost everyone is from Chicago and at their first devopsdays, so they are in the same place as you. Talk to each other!
So, examples from where I work. I'm at
DramaFever, the world's largest streaming video site for international content, and also hiring. And awesome.
We're using exciting stuff like
Docker in production. And as Michael Ducy put it, that's
The Future of Everything. So does that make us a magical perfect unicorn?
Knowing animals is not a pink-haired thought leadership conspiracy skill, apparently.
Team Minneapolis; thanks to Chicago!
