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Gartner Q&A: Cameron Haight Talks About DevOps - Part 2

Pete Goldin
Editor and Publisher
APMdigest

In Part 2 of this exclusive interview, Cameron Haight, Gartner Research VP, IT Operations, discusses the focus of his research for the last few years: DevOps.

Start with Part 1 of the interview

APM: What are the main advantages of DevOps that a company can gain?

CH: DevOps is ultimately about improving the business. It is not just about making IT in alignment with the business, but in the context of DevOps, IT is the business. IT cannot be looked at as a cost center. Not just to drive down costs. IT needs to look at how they can provide more value added capabilities that the business needs.

Mobile channels and digital channels are becoming quite critical. The expectations are very different when you interact with a smartphone device than if you are sitting at your desktop. So to enable new capabilities; to do A/B testing; to be more like a lean startup; to learn about customer desires, wants and needs – DevOps is an approach to help enable that.

APM: When DevOps is embraced by organization, if they do it right, will they have less problems on the production end?

CH: I would not say less problems, but the problems will change. You're always going to have problems. In the DevOps world you are always experimenting, you are going to find things that do not work. You are going to continuously iterate to improve. We try this, that didn't work, so we try something else.

Automation, hopefully, tries to remove some of the manual problems that crop up. One of the benefits of automation is consistency. We do this thing over and over again automatically, and we can now know what the results are because the human error part is largely removed from the equation. But we have to be careful that we don't blindly adopt it, because automation has gone awry in other domains. We have to be careful how we design these systems to ensure that we’re not just doing the wrong thing even faster.

But in a larger context, we have to be careful that we don't fall into the hammer and nail syndrome where we assume that the solution to every problem is a tool. The Amazons and Googles and Facebooks of the world are systems thinkers. So they try to look at: how can we improve this? And sometimes the answer is to re-architect it and therefore reduce the complexity. And maybe build manageability “in” at the beginning. And perhaps that means we need less of these tools like APM on the back end of that process because we built it right the first time. That may be an outcome.

At the end of the day DevOps is about proving the business outcomes by changing your culture and how you look at IT and how you perform IT. We are always going to have problems, but the question is how do we address (and learn from) them? How do we solve them? The goal is to recognize those problems and fix them as quickly as possible and in the process recognize that the problem is the problem and not get into a “blame game” mode of behavior. Agile and DevOps help us iterate towards getting it right quicker.

APM: What is the best way to help development teams to ensure top application performance before an app goes into production?

CH: Be a part of the discussion early in the lifecycle. One of my ambitions in life has been to get rid of the term “nonfunctional requirements”. Nonfunctional requirements are those which are not business logic related such as availability, maintainability, usability, things like that. Oftentimes, in the classic development organizations, those nonfunctional requirements have low priorities and are seemingly optional because the requirement is to get the code out the door, not to build manageability. So Operations needs to be part of those planning sessions where they discuss the backlog and what needs to be developed in the next interval. Operational concerns need to be put in the backlog as user stories, or perhaps operational stories, demanding the same level of attention of those development teams as the business-related needs.

In addition, I see development as increasingly owning deploy, so guess who gets the problem calls when it doesn't work. It won't be the Operations team, it will be the Development team. So it is in their own best interest to think about “nonfunctional requirements”.

APM: How is that accomplished, by having more conversations?

CH: At the end of the day, DevOps is about changing the culture. Start building a culture of trust and openness and collaboration. And so, formally it is in those sessions. But it has to take place all the time. I see some organizations put people together physically. Not just having the Ops side of the floor and the Dev side of the floor, but actually mixing desks, to build that relationship. It is about knowing what the other person has to go through.

Read Part 3 of the interview, covering Application Performance Management (APM).

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Gartner Q&A: Cameron Haight Talks About DevOps - Part 2

Pete Goldin
Editor and Publisher
APMdigest

In Part 2 of this exclusive interview, Cameron Haight, Gartner Research VP, IT Operations, discusses the focus of his research for the last few years: DevOps.

Start with Part 1 of the interview

APM: What are the main advantages of DevOps that a company can gain?

CH: DevOps is ultimately about improving the business. It is not just about making IT in alignment with the business, but in the context of DevOps, IT is the business. IT cannot be looked at as a cost center. Not just to drive down costs. IT needs to look at how they can provide more value added capabilities that the business needs.

Mobile channels and digital channels are becoming quite critical. The expectations are very different when you interact with a smartphone device than if you are sitting at your desktop. So to enable new capabilities; to do A/B testing; to be more like a lean startup; to learn about customer desires, wants and needs – DevOps is an approach to help enable that.

APM: When DevOps is embraced by organization, if they do it right, will they have less problems on the production end?

CH: I would not say less problems, but the problems will change. You're always going to have problems. In the DevOps world you are always experimenting, you are going to find things that do not work. You are going to continuously iterate to improve. We try this, that didn't work, so we try something else.

Automation, hopefully, tries to remove some of the manual problems that crop up. One of the benefits of automation is consistency. We do this thing over and over again automatically, and we can now know what the results are because the human error part is largely removed from the equation. But we have to be careful that we don't blindly adopt it, because automation has gone awry in other domains. We have to be careful how we design these systems to ensure that we’re not just doing the wrong thing even faster.

But in a larger context, we have to be careful that we don't fall into the hammer and nail syndrome where we assume that the solution to every problem is a tool. The Amazons and Googles and Facebooks of the world are systems thinkers. So they try to look at: how can we improve this? And sometimes the answer is to re-architect it and therefore reduce the complexity. And maybe build manageability “in” at the beginning. And perhaps that means we need less of these tools like APM on the back end of that process because we built it right the first time. That may be an outcome.

At the end of the day DevOps is about proving the business outcomes by changing your culture and how you look at IT and how you perform IT. We are always going to have problems, but the question is how do we address (and learn from) them? How do we solve them? The goal is to recognize those problems and fix them as quickly as possible and in the process recognize that the problem is the problem and not get into a “blame game” mode of behavior. Agile and DevOps help us iterate towards getting it right quicker.

APM: What is the best way to help development teams to ensure top application performance before an app goes into production?

CH: Be a part of the discussion early in the lifecycle. One of my ambitions in life has been to get rid of the term “nonfunctional requirements”. Nonfunctional requirements are those which are not business logic related such as availability, maintainability, usability, things like that. Oftentimes, in the classic development organizations, those nonfunctional requirements have low priorities and are seemingly optional because the requirement is to get the code out the door, not to build manageability. So Operations needs to be part of those planning sessions where they discuss the backlog and what needs to be developed in the next interval. Operational concerns need to be put in the backlog as user stories, or perhaps operational stories, demanding the same level of attention of those development teams as the business-related needs.

In addition, I see development as increasingly owning deploy, so guess who gets the problem calls when it doesn't work. It won't be the Operations team, it will be the Development team. So it is in their own best interest to think about “nonfunctional requirements”.

APM: How is that accomplished, by having more conversations?

CH: At the end of the day, DevOps is about changing the culture. Start building a culture of trust and openness and collaboration. And so, formally it is in those sessions. But it has to take place all the time. I see some organizations put people together physically. Not just having the Ops side of the floor and the Dev side of the floor, but actually mixing desks, to build that relationship. It is about knowing what the other person has to go through.

Read Part 3 of the interview, covering Application Performance Management (APM).

Hot Topic
The Latest
The Latest 10

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...