The many meanings of "DevOps," legacy software, & adulthood - Coté Memo #22

I’m in New York today for a quick meeting, ostensibly on DevOps, but as ever on how organizations can do software better. “DevOps” has increasingly become the term people use when they mean “doing all that new stuff, in new ways.” Vendors, like Pivotal, have tried to use the phrase “cloud native” to describe it, but that hasn’t stuck too much outside of the vendoring and chattering class. The key phrases, I’d say, are:

  1.  “Cloud” as in “we’re putting together a "cloud strategy” and want the benefits of cloud technologies (automation, self-service, cost, bursting), private or public.
  2. “Agile” as the loose identifier for “what developers do” which isn’t used as much as it should be: I’m overly fond of pointing out that most people don’t really do enough of “agile.”
  3. “DevOps” as a catch phrase what the IT department does a whole to support all this and how its processes changes.

Occasionally, I’ll hear that someone is doing a “continuous delivery project” as the overall initiative that’s driving change.

All of that is why I’ve snarkily been calling my talks “Not actually a DevOps talk” because, really, DevOps has been up-leveled to anhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/30513730244/in/datetaken-public/ all purpose wrapper for “the new shit.”

In the financial district, New York.
In the financial district, New York.

Legacy Software Sucks

Deal with Legacy Before it Deals with You

Coté Content

Software Defined Talk Episode #80: The case for flying Southwest and Oracle buying Dyn, and containers
Book Review: New Books for Understanding DevOps - The New Stack
What it looks like to come up with a new deck.
What it looks like to come up with a new deck.

Links!

SUSE to Acquire HPE’s OpenStack, Cloud Foundry Portfolio, Boost Kubernetes Investment - The New Stack
The Container Landscape: Docker Alternatives, Orchestration, and Implications for Microservices
OpenStack: vendor updates and enterprise adoption roundup
 Donald Trump lost most of the American economy in this election

Work/Life Balance

I like his recent album.