The magic devops button

It has been a while since I have blogged. It just we are crazily busy and some thing had to take the toll. But here I am, more fresh and with more experiences to share. Here I go.
In a recent discussion with a DevOps expert, I was asking him what is that dream you want to achieve as a DevOps engineer. His answer was quick. “Culture apart, I need this – big and bold – button called ‘DevOps’. Development teams click on it and it does all the magic.”
I thought that was a very nice abstraction of the DevOps dream. If it could find magically who the user is and manoeuvre him through what he wants to do, it may bring a good amount of simplicity to him. A great way to bring self service!
To make that happen, there is, of-course a ton of automation that need to go into the button, but is that it? Will DevOps end in extreme amount of automation so all can be bundled in a button? That got me thinking.
The questions come really afterclicking that button.
  • Who clicked on that button?
  • How was he allowed to click that button?
  • What is the history of the click?
  • Should he be allowed to click the button in the context he is in?
  • What did he pass when he clicked the button?
  • Does everyone know he clicked the button?
  • What is the overall quality of the click?
  • How often does he click the button?
  • Has he clicked the button now and something is going on?
  • and the list goes on.
All these questions help one to ensure, when a person ends up clicking this button, he does not in-advertantly end up doing something which he should not be doing. With the “power” of such a button, comes a a whole set of responsibilities.
These set of responsibilities led us to believe that DevOps need more than a button, it needs a platform to help end consumers leverage automation effectively.
Leaving culture apart, automation is key to DevOps but what is more important is to orchestrate these point automations to reach a common goal of DevOps, which is constant and consistent updates to applications and environments.
We continue on that course of-course.

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