mike.mainguy

My short answer is: "very". My Long answer Follows: Devops is a reaction to a common problem in software development. It's referred to here as a "wall of confusion". I've blogged on this before and anybody who has ever worked in a shop with two different teams (ops vs dev) you will likely understand the problem very well. Inherently, Ops wants stability and dev wants change. I believe the recent push for "agile" in IT organizations has aggravated this problem to an extreme in some places. This aggravation has been because the focus of agile has been on the DEVELOPMENT of software, but not the OPERATION of software. To clarify how these responsibilities are typically divided: DEVELOPMENT Perspective Make new features for customers Get it done quickly Get it done cheaply Move on to next thing Don't worry too much about the future or past… Live in the NOW OPERATIONS Perspective Fix the messes created by development Prevent ...

I'm taking a vacation day today. I woke up at 5:00 to take my daughter to school (trip to six flags), then went downstairs to put some finishing touches on some html I was fiddling around with to help with some new screens. While doing this a developer on my team started IM'ing me in a panic about a production problem that they where going to do an emergency deploy to fix. I attempted to calmly ask her to please explain the exact situation to me, but it came out more like "ARE YOU F'ING JOKING!? TELL ME YOU AREN'T SERIOUS!, WHAT THE HELL?". Whoops, no more coffee for me, my bad. So then I opened my email inbox and discovered no less than a dozen emails about about how the day before there was some sort of error that cropped up based on a specific data condition and stopped an extract process dead in it's tracks. For some reason, this software has run without exception for 2 months and suddenly yesterday at 5:00pm this data condition started to happen. W...