Hi, this is my first post on Matt’s blog. I’ve been an avid supporter of his blogging for a while and today got an invite to contribute. So here’s my post (created very quickly before he changes his mind).
My job has always been within an operations department of software product companies. I started at a small company as ‘everything’ support and slowly drifting towards a specialisation in the more recently branded DevOp’sy areas as I made my way through various acquisitions and mergers. Over the past couple of years I’ve found myself building DevOps teams. During that time I’ve discovered some of the things that work and almost everything that doesn’t work (or it feels like that :) ).
Some of the things that have worked.. (for me anyway)
Obviously these are going to be quite subjective and I doubt they will work for everyone. I’ll focus mostly on what I think are the key ingredients of a successful team. Maybe some people will find it interesting. Bare in mind that this only really applies to an operations team that supports a Cloud service.
I’m not a big football fan but I can draw some parallels between football managers and DevOps teams. You don’t see Arsenal winning and losing games based on their process redesigns. I may be simplifying, and I’m sure tactics plays a large part, but I believe you get quite a bit more out of a team when you have excellent players. Players who excel in different areas. My teams tend to be 5 – 7 players nowadays and between all of us we need to cover a few areas.
The first is product knowledge.. If you have a product guru in your team then you’ve got a productivity catalyst. So many aspects of our work involves investigating whether issues are product vs config and whether we can improve things from an operational perspective that will result in the product running better. The most recent team has a Product Architect and he’s awesome. He’s on the cutting edge of ideas for the product, for Amazon AWS and for all of the supporting technologies. Having a dedicated resource to do all of this in the background is great – it means that when we automate his prototypes and release them we get the maximum benefit. Recent examples include our Public API work and the work being done on our Amazon architecture to improve speed (CDN’s etc).
The second role I’ve always tried to fill is an engineer (at least one person, preferably two). Get the most senior developer(s) that you can, who knows the language of the product and build system of the product that you are supporting. You can now write the high level instrumentation that every DevOps teams need – as is true with any automation project. There is only ever so far you can go with Bash (I tend to take things beyond where they are supposed to be with Bash as it is). Ultimately having a senior developer or two buys you a massive amount of flexibility. Need a web service for something like externalised Puppet variables?.. you can write your own. Backup scripts not fast enough?.. a senior developer will make those scripts look very feeble in comparison when rewritten in their preferred language and multithreaded. I’m careful about not reinventing the wheel and will usually go off and clone something from Github before starting from scratch myself. But having some people who can write stuff from scratch is a major advantage. One caveat I would say for this role – hire from outside. Developers usually end up getting pulled back to work on stuff they did at the company at some stage. If you can, hire a new person and liven things up. Obviously tell the engineering teams that the hire(s) are for instrumentation in case they get worried that you want to start adding buttons to the product :)
Lastly, the sysadmins. I’d actually consider myself one of these at heart. Getting a good sysadmin can be tricky. It’s not uncommon to read 100 CV’s before finding someone even remotely eligible. For a DevOps team you need a reasonably rare mix of skills.. people who know linux inside out, who can script and get excited by the latest batch of tools, and nowadays you need to throw Puppet / Chef into the mix. I have a couple of these currently and consider myself extremely blessed. Everything that we do is checked into source control (we use AWS as our data center) and this buys us a lot of things.. like the ability to automate everything, reduce costs by deleting and recreating at whim and disaster recovery. However, you pay for those things buy hiring really good people.. which is a cost saving in the long run once the cost saving benefits of the team start to show.
Now if you add in all of those types of role.. what I’ve found works quite nicely is running the team without being too focussed on the separation of responsibility. Everyone is on call 24/7. Everyone is expect to know the product inside out (although nobody will get near the level of expertise of the Product Architect), everyone scripts (even me) and ultimately everyone will end up doing some programming tasks. You can probably see from Matt’s previous blog posts about the Metrics project he got the chance to learn some Ruby. I think it’s important that everyone knows a bit of everyone else’s job.. although when under pressure everyone naturally drops back into doing what they are good at to speed things along.
This probably looks a little odd from the outside. But it makes things fun, everyone stays engaged and ultimately we all share the same goal: scale to 1 million users :D
soimasysadmin 