Blog Posts tagged ‘developers’

Historically, the battle lines were drawn and everyone was bracing themselves, ready for combat..

On one side, you have the Devs wanting to make a change to a production server immediately to get their new shiny feature working and the SysOps on the other side, desperate not to give an inch for fear of upsetting the uptime gods.

Each party thinking to themselves: “does it really need to be this hard?” .. “Why doesn’t the other get it?”

The Times They Are a-Changin’ and with it, a new fan-dangled word:

DEVOPS

wait! … wtf??! Devops??! Who?! What?

Well.. Depending on who you ask, it means any number of things, my view is it comes down to a combination of attitude, cultural and process changes which need to be applied to both system administrators and developers alike. Forming the super-creature…. a “DevOp”. Through this combination it will allow people working on either aspect to operate in a smarter, more collaborated fashion and achieve outcomes which are best for business.

At Anchor, obviously being a group of professional sysadmins who manage public-facing websites factors like reputation and uptime are everything; meaning that we feel these pressures essentially on a day to day basis. That said, we do have the pleasure of working with some of the best developers around and we’re awfully keen to embrace any changes which allow us to support these people better.

With this in mind we routinely are actively involved in local DevOps meetups here in Sydney — coincidently there’s a meetup on tomorrow night, held at the orient in the historic rocks area of Sydney. With this in mind we would encourage anyone who is a dev, an op or a devop to drop in to one of these meetups and chat with like minded folk.

On a slightly different, but still related note, Anchor’s Benjamin Smith will be presenting at the annual PyCon conference, being held in Sydney this weekend at 10:20am Sunday. The topic of the talk is: “Sysadmins vs Developers, a take from the other side of the fence”, whilst registration has closed for this conference, this talk will be recorded and presented on Blip.TV (URL will be provided once available) with the slides from the talk being released via our website.