The key to successful collaboration within IT teams isn’t just about aligning the work of developers with that of operations teams. We must also release the development skills that lie dormant within the production teams. Nasdaq’s head of DevOps says the time has come for production teams to play a bigger role as developers.
Encouraging a developer mentality is now critical, said Amado Gramajo, vice president of DevOps infrastructure and engineering at Nasdaq, who shared his experiences at the recent Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) conference. . You have administrators on the operations side and developers on the other side. It’s time to encourage administrators to think more like developers, he insisted.
“Happiness for developers is staying at the top of their creative flow, with stable quality, stable code, stable deployment. A happy developer means they have good software. A happy developer will be nice for Ops” , said Mr. Gramajo.
The big question of rapid software deployment
If development methodologies and techniques have enabled Dev teams to produce software very frequently, “it’s also about deploying this software quickly” he explains.
Opportunities for productivity gains therefore now appear in the Build and Test phase which precedes deployment. So we need to focus on engineering the productivity of development, he said. “This is how we improve the quality of software and create real added value for the company.”
The problem, he continued, is that software is designed, built, deployed and managed by separate teams: “As new technologies emerge – the cloud, Kubernetes – companies have designed dedicated teams, such as infosec, internal audit and infrastructure. This constitutes many teams that have a specific function or objective. This is not a negative thing because with this system you get more controls , no more safeguards.”
Shared services platforms for Devs, Ops, and other IT professionals
But the logic of DevOps integration is also hampered by the fact that IT professionals are paid and mandated for single-purpose roles, Gramajo said. “The developer works on the project he is paid to do. He cannot change everything. This creates friction between the development group and other teams.”
The solution proposed by Mr. Gramajo, who manages more than 130 stock markets around the world, is to create shared services platforms where developers, operations teams and other IT professionals can collaborate. Mr. Gramajo, who comes from Ops, realized that many people working with him became de facto developers in their own right.
Company or workplace culture – which everyone wants to change – is almost impossible to change, he says. Rather, he advocates a systematic and technical approach. “If a company is trying to implement a DevOps system, the first thing to do is ask how to change the culture. You have to change the culture. But no one ever changes the culture for real, right “We just talk about it and display values in discussions while waiting for the elevator.”
What can be changed is the mindset of Ops
But what can be changed is the mindset of Ops. It needs to be “oriented more towards engineering. Instead of waiting for something to happen, you start developing a solution.” They then realize that they are not only administrators, but also engineers who write code.
By leveraging this approach, “you are able to change the culture,” he hopes. “What defines a company is how people work there. And how they work is based on policies and procedures. So the challenge is to start looking at policies and procedures and enable the operations team to work and operate more like developers.
Source: “ZDNet.com”