itSMFI 2017 Forum Focus - June Forum Focus ITSMFI | Page 28

Part III describes how to accelerate Flow by
building the foundations of the deployment
pipeline: enabling fast and effective automated
testing, continuous integration, continuous
delivery, and architecting for low-risk releases.
Part IV discusses how to accelerate and amplify
Feedback by creating effective production
telemetry to see and solve problems, better
anticipate problems and achieve goals, enable
feedback so that Dev and Ops can safely deploy
changes, integrate testing into the daily work, and
create review and coordination processes to
increase the quality of the work.
Part V describes how to accelerate Continual
Learning by establishing a just culture, converting
local discoveries into global improvements, and
properly reserving time to create organizational
learning and improvements.
Finally, Part VI describes how to properly
integrate security and compliance into our daily
work, by integrating preventative security
controls into shared source code repositories and
services, integrating security into the deployment
pipeline, enhancing telemetry to better enable
detection and recovery, protecting the
deployment pipeline, and achieving change
management requirements.
The book initially uses quite a few pages to
introduce DevOps, which might seem a bit
annoying if you have read "The Phoenix Project".
On the other hand, new readers can jump directly
to "The DevOps Handbook" without reading "The
Phoenix Project" first. In the introduction, the
authors also use some effort to justify DevOps -
but I guess they preach to the converted. If we
have bought the book we understand the
problem - now we are looking forward to the
solutions.
The book is not difficult to read, but it may still be
hard to absorb as it is packed with information
and practices. Although it only takes up 250 pages
of text, it has nonetheless taken me a while to get
through it. There are countless good examples
from reality, and the authors are generous with
findings and reports that support the practices
and views presented in the book. On the other
hand, more illustrations would be useful and
28 itSMFI Forum Focus—June 2017
some templates and tools would have been
beneficial.
The book is definitely worth reading and it has the
potential to become the textbook among the many
emerging publications on DevOps. If you want to
know what DevOps is, read "The DevOps
Handbook"!
If I have to come up with some criticism, it is
therefore not of the book, but of the great focus on
DevOps these years. There is no doubt that DevOps
is a necessary further development to the way we
have been manufacturing technology so far. But
the weakness of DevOps is that there is a risk to
draw all the attention towards creating an
assembly line for continuous development, testing
and delivery of applications. Thus, there is a risk
that the service aspect will drown while we try to
control the IT factory. “The surgery was successful,
but the patient died.”
Manufacturing of applications and platforms can
never be anything but an underlying prerequisite
for service provision, and the IT departments that
focus blindly on developing, maintaining, and
operating applications and platforms will be
reduced to internal suppliers rather than real
co-creators of enterprise value. The authors of the
book are to some degree aware of this fact: IT must
“enable and sustain the fast flow of work from
Development into Operations without causing
chaos and disruption to the production environ-
ment or our customers.” But they never really
address the need for the continual daily value
co-creation between IT and the business including
the responsibility for the users' value creation.
Dev and Ops merge, but they must also merge with
Service. Hopefully, that will happen in the coming
years, so the next wave can become SerDevOps. To
keep the context of building a house, it is not
enough that we are effective in constructing,
developing and maintaining houses on assembly
lines. Our primary task is not to build suitable
homes in partnership with the residents, but to
operate a hotel. We are hotel hosts, and our job is
to ensure that our guests get the most out of their
stay - every day!