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Automation communities and Chef in the Enterprise

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justinredd edited this page Oct 8, 2014 · 2 revisions

Automation communities and Chef in the Enterprise

Friday, Issaquah, 11:00

Automation communities and Chef in the Enterprise

Challenges of introducing DevOps culture into tradional corporations

  • Very siloed
  • Averse to change

Building a cross team skunkworks group

Communications

  • Daily standups / scrum
  • Email list
  • Chat room

Mission statement for workgroup

  • Speed up time it takes to provision VMs
  • After solving that problem, move on to more tasks (what common tasks can we automate?)

Setup collaboration environment in the beginning

  • Github enterprise
  • Allow anyone to see the code / configs
  • Pull requests for anyone who traditionally couldn't access configs / systems
  • Bring developers closer to Ops

Much of "DevOps" can be to create an internal "PaaS" in an enterprise

  • Build a good interface to an API for a process
  • Chef and all the tools are less important than defining that process and those APIs

"Office Hours"

  • Set aside time each week for people who want to make things better but don't know how

Internal Trainers

  • Chef (the company) trained about 80 people.
  • Those people went on to write a curriculum to train more of the company in Chef

Sweep the request ticket queues for patterns

  • Reach out to help and work together to solve those common problems

What tools to use internally to work together?

  • Internal StackOverflow
  • Boots on the ground, face to face, work together
  • Drink beers! Establish camaraderie.

Survey Devs and PMs to see how much time is spent dealing with "Environment Issues"

  • Invariably will be larger than it should be
  • Wasted time = wasted money
  • Use this for leverage for funding and resources

Lots of focus on finding an executive sponsor to champion these projects

  • Most successful initiatives seem to start with an executive buy in
  • Important to learn "how" to talk to executives and convince them of the value

Value stream mapping

  • Big difference in showing there is a problem and selling in a solution

How to upsell the value through layers of management - VP and above

You have money - how do you use it to get buy in to Chef?

  • Hire external champions who know what the fuck they are doing to show everyone internal what to do
  • In one case - bring in 3 people to lead an org of 160 people
  • Certain consulting firms are growing from this model
  • Can certainly alienate mid managers who don't have their hands on the keyboards and don't understand
  • Shitty pattern that has been happening is neglecting the political structure changes and onboarding. Management can serve as a blocker

Use The Strangler Pattern on the org

  • Link executive sponsor to the success of your projects
  • Either the hold outs (middle managers) get on board or they get fired

Scope creep is a huge issue - one of the biggest causes of failure of Chef / DevOps in the enterprise

  • Scope gets so large that it becomes impossible and real progress falters

If things don't get better, if you can't get management buy in - just leave

  • The law of two feet
  • Lots of jobs out there
  • Your company or org needs to get on board or they can die

Diagraming states of chef adoption in the enterprise

Language is very important when selling Chef

  • You can't be confrontational
  • Very subtle selling of a philosophy

Change will follow the Satir change curve

  • There will be a time of difficulty. The pit of despair.
  • Typical of all change agents - some will be thrown into the pit.
  • Only some will make it back out into the new status quo
  • Are you Frodo? Galdalf? Sam Wise?
  • Conceptual models are not sufficient to enact change

Sneak chef in small ways and show incremental improvements

Book recommendations:

  • Driving Technical Change
  • Fearless Change (Hacking human behavior)

Buy food for everyone! Its good when you allow people to owe you.

Victim / Hero / Perpetrator model

  • This must die. In order for their to be a hero there must be a victim and a perpetrator
  • Stop labeling

Its difficult to have compassion for those who have power over you

  • Also difficult to get them to share their concerns and needs, as that can be threatening to them
  • Go out with beers and food with them. Just talk as humans and relate and understand each other.

Journey to get app developers writing cookbooks

  • This can be scary
  • Can create a major change in making the entire deploy model better
  • If devs feel the pain of their deploys (grabbing war file from here and configs from there and stand on your head and fart sideways but only on a Tuesday), then they will be motivated to improve the deploy processes - maybe just turn it into an RPM

There are always people who resist change. Asking people to relearn how to do their jobs.

  • Asking them to unpack their own problems and help them solve them can move them along.
  • Just labeling them and pushing change is not enough to get them on board

Tactics on how to being devlopment teams into alignment is fundamental to success.

  • Get people from all parts of the org together
  • Don't ask Devs to solve your ops problems
  • Don't ask Ops to design the Dev environments
  • Bring solutions and work together

How can we collaborate with each other? The traditional community model is not working.

  • Stephen - Starting a subgroup to discuss this further

Chef Community Guidelines

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