My ‘meetup’ with Gene Kim

Gene Kim is by far one of the most recognizable names in the DevOps industry. He is vocal, present, opinionated (in a good way), a thought leader and the co-author of the best book in this space: The Phoenix Project! Earlier this week Gene came to Virginia to speak at the DC Continuous Delivery and Continuous Delivery meetup (this meetup, I am sure, has the longest name on meetup.com). I had presented at this meet up earlier in the year too. So, I got to rub shoulders with the man himself AND got an autographed copy of his book. I actually already owned the book and took it with me to get it signed, but Gene was giving away copies!

Why everyone needs DevOps now?

The talk Gene delivered was titled – Why Everyone Needs DevOps Now? An excellent talk on the need for DevOps, based on the study Gene participated in with PuppetLabs on the State of DevOps, Gene’s personal experiences and of course, the Phoenix Project Book.

His slides are available here on Slideshare.net. The meetup organizers also recorded the session. The video is embedded here:

Why does everyone need DevOps?

Here are some key takeaways I personally got from Gene’s talk.

Act I. Create ‘Flow’:

Identify what your bottlenecks are – Idea to Production – where is there queue time (as opposed to run time):

• Environment Creation
• Code Deployment
• Test setup and run
• Overly tight Architecture
• Development
• Product Management

Where can you address bottlenecks to make the process more efficient and effective?

Act II: Get feedback:

How can you ‘amplify’ feedback loops from each stage of the delivery pipeline, back to earlier stages in the pipeline? Do you have metrics that are consumable?

Act III: Continual Experimentation:

In true spirit of ‘Lean Thinking’, one can only learn by trying out new things and learning from the experience. To quote Gene – ‘Repetition of a pre-requisite to mastery’.

Other Gems:

Keep 20% of time dedicated for ‘technical debt’ reduction

Decouple feature releases from code deployments (details of this one in a later post. This is a true gem!)

Follow Gene on Twitter and check out his website.

Follow me on Twitter and check out more posts on DevOps.

Understanding DevOps:

• Understanding DevOps – Part 1: Defining DevOps
• Understanding DevOps – Part 2: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
• Understanding DevOps – Part 3: The Battle of Dev vs Ops
• Understanding DevOps – Part 4: Continuous Testing and Continuous Monitoring
• Understanding DevOps – Part 5: Infrastructure as Code

Adopting DevOps:

• Adopting DevOps – Part I: Begin with the Why
• Adopting DevOps – Part II: The Need for Organizational Change
• Adopting DevOps – Part III: Aligning Dev and Ops Teams

Related Posts:

• DevOps 101 – Concepts and Basics (Slides from IBM Innovate 2013)
• Continuous Integration for System z (Slides from IBM Innovate 2013)
• DevOps for Mobile (Slides from IBM Innovate 2013)
• What is Water-SCRUM-Fall?
• Leveraging DevOps in a water-SCRUM-fall world
• Best Practices of Mobile DevOps
• Video and Slides from my Mobile DevOps session at MoDevEast 2012
• Monetate’s 12-step program for Continuous Delivery
• There is no such thing as ‘DevOps for Mobile Apps’!
• The State of DevOps (by PuppetLabs)
• DevOps for Mobile Apps – Slides from IBM Pulse 2013
• Chef for DevOps – An Introduction