A policeman in a Jar

What DevOps do?

This is a good question, no one dares to admit that she doesn't know

What is IT infrastructure?

The nicest explanation I learned from Otter Networks

The physical and organisational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, schools and hospitals ) needed for the existence of a society or enterprise.

In IT we can consider anything in a computer system that is not the application infrastructure. Application software is a set of one or more programs designed to carry out operations for a specific application. Application software cannot run on itself but is dependent on system software to execute.

A policeman in jar 

Image 1: A policeman in a jar, Bucharest 1969, when president Nixon visited Romania ruled by Ceausescu.

In  Romanian, it means "Un Militian la borcan". He was sitting inside that red and white "jar" cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and manually changed the lights from red to green and green to red according to his own mood or judgement. If he needed to go to a bathroom, he locked the jar with a key and visited a restaurant or a shop nearby, sometimes for hours before re-opening his jar.

When we emigrated in the West, people often asked: "Is it true that in Romania there are still policemen in a jar, changing manually the stoplights?"  "Yes", we said. And everybody laughed, At the time, there were almost no cars on the street, except public transportation and government officials Pobeda cars, The policeman-in-a-jar manual style of traffic control, worked, sort of.

Legacy Data Centers

Most of the data centers today are legacy data centers. They were not designed as Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC), Software defined Networks (SDN)  and Software Designed Storage (SDS),

In a matter on one year or so, all 2015 legacy Data Center will be laughed at, as Policemen in Jars. A change in infrastructure is a nightmare and the user experience or pleasure is no where in sight.

Image 2: Data Center Migration . The 2015 version of a policeman-in-a-jar

The power of DevOps

See below an excellent illustration from Dynatrace, one of the leading DevOps organization disguised as Performance Measurement people. They are much more than that.

Image 3: Self-explanatory, from  Dynatrace e-book

The results of DevOps

These achievements are attributed to DevOps. It all started with Flickr in 2009.

• Flickr was one of the first to announce they were following DevOps principles with 10 deployments a day way back in 2009
• TurboTax recently made 165 production changes during peak tax season resulting in 50% increase in website conversion rate.
• Amazon deploys at an amazing pace: every 11.6s with 23,000 deployments a day. They have had 75% fewer outages since 2006, 90% fewer outage minutes, and only 0.001% deployments cause a problem

Now see these claims, impossible not to like and impossible to validate

30x more frequent deployments

8000x faster lead times than peers

2x the change success rate

12x faster mean time to recover

2.5x more likely to exceed profitability, market share and productivity goals

50% higher market capital growth over 3 years

Great. But how do you hire a DevOp?

 DevOps are hard to identify and hire. They are very smart guys. Each one uses different tools, software and skills to offer results, and one company is rarely compatible with another DevOps company. As a sesoned DevOp founder described his place in Europe

 in Berlin there is a thriving startup scene. Many of these fledgling companies are composed of a few guys; usually trying to work agile; putting together their application whilst simultaneously trying to work out how to use the AWS API and remember what the hell a subnet mask is meant to do.

These "fledgling companies" are magicians and show you miracles out of a black box. These are the kind of talent one can not hire, unless acquihiring their firms

A simple question

Does it make sense to stop trying to program data center infrastructure on equipment that was never designed for this purpose? It's amazing how the DevOps went beyond the "policemen-in-a-jar" stage, juggling with amazing skill. But there is a limit to it 

Image 4: The limit of Juggling

The Redfish Specification

This is what Dell, Intel, HP and Emerson are doing: A Datacenter Manageability fit for the 21st Century

Redfish is a modern intelligent manageability interface and lightweight data model specification that is scalable, discoverable and extensible.

Redfish is suitable for a multitude of end-users, from the datacenter operator to an enterprise management console.

I can write an imaginary blog entry when the new generation Redfish based, using Intel dis-aggregated hardware concept will make every developer a DevOps. They can program the infrastructure, the containers and the multiple operating systems as easy as coding apps today

Ericsson

From Otter Networks FreeIPA Technical Briefs

One of the main tenants of Cloud is the rejection of traditional IT practices. The big ITIL manuals went straight into the bin as agile teams rejected traditional system administration as a way of handling IT. This transformation has, for the most part, been extremely positive for Business. Business leaders no longer have to claw through a mountain of bureaucratic change control in order to get a new feature implemented

Ericsson response to this insightful observation is in this white paper  Ericsson Introduces a Hyperscale Cloud Solution based on HDS 8000 hardware platform

As the massive growth of information technology services places increasing demand on the datacenter it is important to re-architect the underlying infrastructure, allowing companies and end-users to benefit from an increasingly services-oriented world.

Datacenters need to deliver on a new era of rapid service delivery. Across network, storage and compute there is a need for a new approach to deliver the scale and efficiency required to compete in a future where “hyperscale” is a pre-requisite

Read the white paper.  I am not dreaming. 

 Disclosure

I don’t say anything online that I wouldn’t say in person. I am now an evangelist on contract to the Ericsson Cloud Product Team.  What I say are exclusively my thoughts, views, opinions or understanding of a topic or issue, and not my employer's. I can be wrong even though I try hard not to be. I will admit to mistakes, correct them promptly and even apologize where it is appropriate.