The IT Philharmonic: How out of tune are your operations?

John Willis

Damon Edwards

In an orchestra, people with differing talents, timing, responsibilities, and tools all somehow come together to make beautiful music. Is the task of achieving highly efficient and reliable web operations all that different? In this light-hearted session based on real world examples, we’ll examine the culture and tooling of highly effective and well orchestrated web operations.

Topics: Operations

Abstract
It’s all too common for IT organizations to become compartmentalized. Each segment of the organization develops tunnel vision around their particular tasks and biases around their own tooling. For today’s fast-paced web businesses, the inability to effectively orchestrate all of it’s increasingly dynamic parts leads to slow and unreliable operations.
This presentation will examine, through examples of actual high performing organizations, what “well orchestrated operations” means and what it takes to achieve. We’ll examine both the cultural and tooling requirements as well as the necessary measurements for success.
Outline:
1. What do we mean by “orchestration” -The Philharmonic example (good) -The IT examples (bad)
2. What exactly are the boundaries of “Operations”? -Rolls up to a single business process spanning all the way from requirements to production -“Hey everyone, we are on the same team!” (and all supporting the same business)
3. Set a culture of orchestration: “You can’t incentivize what you can’t measure” -Examples of how poor performing companies improperly measure performance and disincentivize well orchestrated operations -Examples of how high performing companies measure performance in order to incentivize well orchestrated operations
4. Tooling and automation brings orchestration to life -Examples of how high performing companies use tooling to achieve orchestration, including (with emphasis on the integration between the tools): -Requirements traceability -Build Automation -Automated Provisioning -Configuration Management -Test Automation -Monitoring
5. A survey of current trends that are promoting orchestration: -DevOps -Agile Operations -Infrastructure as Code -ITSM monitoring -Test-Driven Operations -Continuous Deployment

John M. Willis is currently the VP of Services at Opscode, Inc. John has worked in the IT management industry for 30 years. He began his professional career at Exxon as an IT infrastructure analyst. He is the founder of four successful startups over the past 20 years Willis is known internationally for his IT Management and Cloud blog. He also has two podcast series on clouds called ‚”Cloud Cafe‚ and Droplets”. Willis is also the co-host of Redmonk’s IT Management Guys‚ podcast series.