September 9, 2014
by Evan Powell
Last week StackStorm had a great group of folks online for a one hour Crowdchat about DevOps, and comments were fast and furious. As expected, Cote from the 451 group (@cote) helped lead the discussion, as well as James Fryman from GitHub (@jfryman), Carmine Rimi from Workday (@carminerimi), and StackStorm’s own Patrick Hoolboom (@phool_stormer). We were also joined by some great guest stars including Andi Mann (@AndiMann) from CA.
A quick summary:
With over 1,229 views of the Crowdchat, participants rated the question, “Is Automation in a place that is good, or is there more work needed?” as the top question asked.
And the top rated response to this question suggested that we still have a long way to go with automation. James Fryman’s answer was:
“There is so much more work needed. We are a lot further along than we were, say 10 years ago, but there are still serious challenges with parts of the stack still not having good API access, humans are still doing too much manual work, etc.”
The second rated response to this question was from yours truly. I had said:
“Yes 🙂 Without automation ‘it’ does not happen. But we have seen automation become a runaway nightmare. Step one troubleshooting for example – ‘turn off the automation’.”
Perhaps at least as notable, within the thread of responses to this question Cote asked: “Can someone define ‘orchestration’ in this #DevOps context? I’m curious what people think it is beyond/above ‘automation’.”
Other topics that we covered that received a lot of positive feedback included: “Are enterprises truly embracing DevOps?”, “What does a DevOps person look like?”, and “Why the heck is DevOps happening?”
If you are interested in DevOps, you will find the transcript really interesting. If I were you I would follow everyone who participated in the Crowdchat on Twitter – and call us out, continue the conversation, and share your opinion.
One last thought – in my opinion you cannot read that transcript, or participate in the Crowdchat as I did – without being convinced that DevOps is real, that many thought leaders agree that automation is an area in need of additional attention, and that together through discussions like this Crowdchat we are making great progress.
Follow me @epowell101 and let me know on Twitter or in the below comments what you think.