Posting my favorites a day early – at least. Try to stay offline this Friday and get some work done around the house. Physical work. I mean, the real deal. Hammer and nail, paint and brush and all…

As always, I am very interested in your favorite DevOps link(s) of this week. Please share them in the comments. I’ll read them all and will give you my biasedopinion. Links are not in a particular order nor do they express a certain preference.

I show you mine, you show me yours.

• How Successful People Stay Calm
  You know how it is, sometimes emotions take over, voices are raised and sometimes chairs are thrown (allegedly). Folks from the University of California found out that medium level of stress might be good for you but at the same time it is important to keep stress levels under control. Tell me about it.
• Put Yourself in Your Colleague’s Shoes
  Same vain as above. In hindsight it looks like I had a lot of stress earlier in the week.
  From the article: "How many conflicts at work result from simply being unable to see the issue from your counterpart’s perspective?"
• Build a DevOps culture: Because you’re better together
  This post is an announcement for an online event hosted by the cool folks from The Register. The event is held on November 7th, 11am GMT.
  The Register is “grilling IBM’s Ashok Reddy with questions: “Everyone’s talking about DevOps, but not everyone can do it. Rapid prototyping that incorporates feedback gets great results when you do it well, but that’s easier said than done. What’s the balance between innovation and optimisation? How do you keep control of the process? How do you ensure it creates better results, not just more work?”
• Feedback fuels Azure Plugin tool updates for Jenkins Developers
  New update to above mentioned plugin. With this latest update, the MS OpenTech team included a new feature to our storage plugin that provides a way to access Jenkins deployment artifacts in Azure Storage anonymously yet securely after a job is complete. Pretty cool, huh?
• Turn the Pressures of Technology into Potential
  Digital technology has certainly and without any doubt touched and deeply influenced the lives of a large portion of the Earth’s population. In the future it will continue to do so in new and still unimaginable ways. It will reach even larger portions of the population. The next industrial revolution is upon us. Can you feel it?
  On the HBR blog John Hagel III  looks at the good, the bad, and the ugly of technology and gives advice to companies and to individuals on how to turn this pressure into potential.
• Create Hudson Slave VMs on Azure with our New Plugin
  Even more good ness from the MS OpenTech team. This time they beefed up the Azure Slave Plugin. In the post you find out about the what and how.
• SDN or Software Defined Networking – Intro to What, Why, How
  Shameless self-promotion of sorts. And while the post is just an intro, it points to some great resources on NetworkComputing about how Microsoft internally implements and uses SDN. Great resource. Great read.

That’s it for this week. Happy reading.
Unlike other posts on this blog, this one does for obvious reasons not have a resources section.

Have fun

Volker

Software Defined This, Software Defined That. We live in a time where our world is largely defined by software. At least in the so called developed world. Software’s everywhere. There’s obvious places like apps on our Smartphones or the PC or MacBook and there are (way more) hidden ones. Hidden to most people that are not intimately involved in building the software or running the infrastructure for all the solutions.

Software Defined Networking or SDN for short abstracts low level network functionality and enables the creation, operation, and control of a flexible network infrastructure across entities requiring or providing network connectivity.

OK, I made up this definition assuming it is general enough to get the idea. There’s plenty of very good definitions of what SDN is and does. Here’s a few:

Microsoft says: “Network without limits for your datacenter without boundaries – Enable application/workload-centric network infrastructure with flexible application mobility across datacenters and clouds. Centralize control of network infrastructure and operations across virtual and physical. Maximize operational efficiency with automated network configuration and management.”

Wikipedia starts its definition of SDN with: “Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to computer networking that allows network administrators to manage network services through abstraction of lower level functionality. This is done by decoupling the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) from the underlying systems that forward traffic to the selected destination (the data plane). The inventors and vendors of these systems claim that this simplifies networking.”

SDN Central’s website states: “Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new approach to designing, building and managing networks. The basic concept is that SDN separates the network’s control (brains) and forwarding (muscle) planes to make it easier to optimize each.”

If you are interested in learning in more detail about SDN and Microsoft you can start with the website I borrowed above definition from and follow the links or you can read a very good summary of SDN my team mate @SymonPerriman wrote for ComputerWeek’s Network Computing. Based on Microsoft own SDN Symon walks the reader through the intricacies of Software Defined Networking.

Real-World SDN, Lesson 1: Management Up Front
Advice about setting realistic goals and focusing on management

Real-World SDN, Lesson 2: Conquer The Enemy Within
About the internal struggles organizations often face when getting started with Software Defined Networking

Real-World SDN, Lesson 3: Focus On The App
Why the applications running on the network should take center stage

Real-World SDN, Lesson 4: Plan For Hybrid Cloud
Why to include support for hybrid cloud, even though you might not need it now

Along the way you will get a biology lesson too. Learn what a “Bowerbird Admin” is and discover a new specifies of spiders. You will cross paths with a Zombie snail and in the first installment of the series learn everything about what a network has in common with a siphonophorae.

Resources

There’s a great free online Coursera course on SDNfrom Georgia Tech.

Have fun.

Volker

“TechEd Europe is the Microsoft premier technology conference for IT Professionals and Enterprise Developers, providing the technical education, product evaluation, and community resources to plan, architect, deploy, manage and secure a connected enterprise.”

This is how the portal presents TechEd, the major Microsoft event for all professionals in IT. Regardless whether you are a developer or work in IT operations, there are way more sessions, hands-on labs, training opportunities, etc. than you will ever be able to consume in the 4 days of the event. Thankfully you don’t have to. All sessions are recorded for posterity.

DevOps Sessions

I personally am looking forward to this year’s event more than ever. My extended team has spun up a large number of activities for DevOps inclined people or attendees who want to know more about what DevOps might mean for them and their organization. The key activities are outlined below. But of course they are only supporting the biggest lineup of DevOps related sessions at a Microsoft TechEd to date.

There are several ways finding DevOps breakout sessions that are right for you. Here’s two:

• Use the session catalog in the Content section of the TechEd Europe website and either filter by Spotlight or use the keyword search on the same page
• Use the raw list of DevOps sessions I tweeted about earlier

DevOps Pre-conference Seminar

Starting TechEd one day early is a great way of learning the latest about DevOps and to connect with peers. All pre-conference seminars run on day 0 of TechEd, on Monday. PRC02 is the session code for the DevOps pre-con. If you have not yet decided which pre-con to go to or if at all, the DevOps dayis definitely worth your time.

DevOps Expert Q+A

On Tuesday we host an expert panel discussion on the Channel 9 stage in the exhibition area. Right before the welcome reception of the exhibitors, we have couple of DevOps experts from Forrester and Microsoft on stage.

Is your organization currently practicing or thinking of practicing DevOps? Tweet your questions using the official hashtag #TalkDevOpsfor a chance to be featured in our DevOps Expert Q+A at TechEd Europe this month. If your question is selected to be answered by our panel of experts, you could receive a copy of The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim.

DevOps Meetup

We’re still figuring out how to best host a DevOps meetup at TechEd this year. Stay tunes for more details on this blog soon.

Hope to see you at TechEd 2014 in Barcelona.

Volker

Culture is a key term in the context of DevOps. And then it feels like it is sometimes one of the most overlooked. When we talk about DevOps we usually refer to People, Process, and Products or the Three Musketeers of DevOps how I like to call them. Culture spans at least the first two, it certainly influences the third and vice versa.

Culture

As we know, every company has its unique “Stallgeruch”, company culture. Even within companies, members of individual teams, large and small, are mostly birds of a feather. When hiring a new member for a team, don’t you pay attention how she or he might “fit” the team? Does the candidate have the right “culture fit” or attitude?

But there is another aspect to an organization’s culture. How do teams do their work? How do they interact with other teams within the organization? Is there a culture of collaboration or is everyone working in his own silo?

You find very special cultures that have developed over the years. Not so much in startups but more in mature enterprise organizations that are already around for many years with long established IT department comprised of strictly defined groups with roles and huge fences between them. Attitudes towards other teams or towards the business have developed as a result of namely years of doing things the way they have been done always.

Culture Debt

That is what culture debt is all about. “This is how we have done it for years. Why should we change?” Valid but wrong question. The questions should be, “What do we gain if we change our way of working together?” or “How do we become more successful by collaborating?” The tried & true is no longer sufficient. Even for well-established enterprises times have changed. Out of need for more agility and to enhance flexibility, shadow IT, one of the scare words in IT departments, has mushroomed everywhere.

Silos of teams with different focus have developed over the years and are now one of the culture debts that needs to be paid off. Breaking down the silos and allowing for closer collaboration between developers and operations teams is one way to pay off the debt. This blog and plenty other resources are here to help.

Today’s fast paced world requires flexible, extremely agile teams; teams being able to react to customer demands in what seems to be the speed of light. Only a new IT with less and less silos, less and less fences between teams – less and less culture debt – will be able to survive.

IT departments, and that includes every role in IT, need to adjust to the modern world. Pay off the accumulated debt. For developers agile development methods are practiced for quite some time. Hopefully they replaced the old waterfall model long ago. And while the development teams budged under the pressure and delivered more and faster results, many operations teams still have not kept up with the times.

Time to even the Balance

As with any other debt, one day is payment day. For many traditional operations teams this time has come. As with any other debt, there is no easy getting out. Embracing a DevOps culture may help many operations team getting out faster.

In the day of Digital Business and beyond, many traditional enterprise IT organizations have turned from providing only internal services into what was traditionally the role of an ISV or Independent Software Vendor and create apps for mobile devices and desktops for customer interaction and more. With the entrance of traditional enterprises into the world of ISVs, there is now room for any culture debt.

In conversations with some of the largest enterprises we see a lot of signs that they started paying off their culture debt. Cross-functional teams are built to solve tough problems that cannot be fixed by only the developers or only operations. Business teams understand they need to talk not only to the developers if new capabilities, features, and products are needed. Operations teams are included in these conversations and begin to develop a sense for the business as never before. CIOs support small incubation teams to test this new way of working – DevOps style.

Successes are shared across different business units within companies as new opportunities arise. New ways of learning and sharing best practices are developed and nurtured across role boundaries. The meaning of the word ownership seems shifting from single or individual to team ownership. As is the term responsibility. Shared ownership, shared responsibility, shared success!

Conclusion

Maybe the term DevOps is currently over-hyped. Its impact on the way of working in a collaborative, inclusive way starts to pay off and many enterprises see their culture debt melting away. Can you see it?

Resources

Some resources you hopefully find useful in your endeavor of DevOps and beyond. Start paying of culture debt and check out these resources:

• Talk to us on Twitter via #TalkDevOps
• Attend the DevOps pre-conference seminar at TechEd Barcelona
• Join our Azure Resource Manager Jump Start
• Assessing and Improving your DevOps capabilities
• Check out the DevOps topic on Edge
• Build a DevOps culture: Because you’re better together
• Empathy and DevOps

Have fun

Volker