What Is Variation?

In part one of this two-part episode on The DevOpsHandbook, Second Edition, Gene Kim speaks with coauthors Patrick Debois and John Willis about the past, present, and future of DevOps. By sharing their personal stories and experiences, Kim, Debois, and Willis discuss the scenius that inspired the book, and why and how the DevOps movement took hold around the world.

They also examine the updated content in the book, including new case studies, updated metrics, and practices. Finally, they each share the new lessons they have learned since writing the handbook and the future challenges they think DevOps professionals need to solve for the future.

Kim will conclude the series in Part 2, where he interviews the remaining two coauthors, Jez Humble and Dr. Nicole Forsgren. 

ABOUT THE GUEST(S)

Patrick Debois is considered to be the godfather of the DevOps movement after he coined the term DevOps accidentally in 2008. Through his work, he creates synergies projects and operations by using Agile techniques in development, project management, and system administration. He has worked in several companies such as Atlassian, Zender, and VRT Media Lab. Currently, he is a Labs Researcher at Synk and an independent IT consultant.

John Willis an author and Senior Director of the Global Transformation Office at Red Hat.. He has been an active force in the IT management industry for over 35 years. Willis’ experience includes being the Director of Ecosystem Development at Docker, the VP of Solutions for Socketplane, the VP of Training and Services at Opscode. He also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award-winning IBM business partner, which specializes in deploying Tivoli technology for the enterprise. 

Patrick DeBois and John Willis are two of five coauthors of The DevOps Handbook along with Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Nicole Forsgren, PhD.

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

• The DevOps origin story from coining the term, why it took off, to launching the DevOps Days conference as an offshoot of the velocity conference. 
• How people thought of DevOps when it was first presented (their reactions, their mentalities, and their willingness to adopt it).  
• What has changed in the DevOps world since the first edition of The DevOps Handbook was published.
• How the rise of SaaS companies is altering the DevOps world and participating in its evolution, and how building solid relationships with SaaS vendors and communicating comprehensive feedback to them is integral to DevOps. 
• The significance of speed in changing team dynamics.
• Why resilient companies like Google and Amazon engineer chaos, and why companies like Toyota are happy when production stoppages happen.  
• Why you can’t afford to provide a high variety of products if you also offer high product variation.

RESOURCES

• Get The DevOps Handbook (Second Edition)
• Nudge vs Shove: A Conversation With Richard Thaler
• Solaris Zones wiki
• Agile Conference in Toronto 2008
• Sys Advent article: In Defense of the Modern Day JVM (Java Virtual Machine) by Gene Kim
• Mob programming
• Breaking Traditional IT Paradigms to... (San Francisco 2015)
• Crowdsourcing Technology Governance (Las Vegas 2018)
• Laying Down the Tracks for Technical Change at Comcast (Las Vegas 2020)
• 10+ Deploys Per Day by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond
• 10+ Deploys Per Day 
• How chaos engineering works at Vanguard
• Patrick DeBois tweet mapping out all the failure modes of an online conference. 
• Jesse Robins LinkedIn 
• Jesse Robbins on Twitter
• How A Hotel Company Ran $30B of Revenue In Containers (Las Vegas 2020) by Dwayne Holmes
• Google Cloud Certified Fellow Program 
• Operations is a competitive advantage… (Secret Sauce for Startups!)
• Love Letter To Conferences (And What Makes Some Truly Amazing) by Gene Kim
• Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother
• Profound podcast by John Willis
• Ben Rockwood on Twitter
• Luke Kanies on LinkedIn
• DevOps 2020 - The Next Decade (London 2020)
• Beyond the Phoenix Project: The Origins and Evolution of DevOps by Gene Kim and John Willis
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
• The Convergence Of DevOps
• Operations as a Strategic Weapon by John Willis
• Iterative Enterprise SRE Transformation (US 2021)

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00] Intro 

[01:18] What’s new and improved in the second edition of the DevOps handbook 

[03:56] Meet Patrick DeBois

[10:35] How faster technology made ideas like DevOps possible

[18:11] The myths and inefficiencies of team autonomy

[20:04] What the first DevOps days were like

[27:59] Different opinions between the dev community and ops community

[30:49] Mob programming and the future of collaboration

[39:31] Two surprising things Patrick learned about DevOps

[47:20] Patrick DeBois’ favorite DevOps patterns 

[51:28] How fear of not delivering on time can mask technical errors

[59:45] What Patrick DeBois is working on these days

[1:04:38] What was expanded in the second edition of the DevOps handbook

[1:06:30] How Gene Kim entered the DevOps world. 

[1:07:38] Meet John Willis

[1:10:42] Why the DevOps movement took off

[1:16:00] Mastering production disasters

[1:23:32] The birth of the DevOps Days conference

[1:37:37] Feelings of belonging and connection in a conference

[1:41:29] A few clarifications

[1:49:32] Two of the greatest DevOps open spaces

[1:52:40] The difference between variety and variation (the cost of knowledge work). 

[2:07:12] Why you should want more stoppages in your production line

[2:10:16] John Willis’ two favorite DevOps case studies

[2:18:55] Outro