DevOps is for all, says DevOps pundit-in-chief. He doesn't have it in for the BOFH, honest

One of the architects of DevOps has said being a 900-year-old organisation with a mainframe is no barrier to overhauling your technology operations, even if you're a European outfit that hasn’t seen a green field development since the 19th century.

However, Gene Kim, author of DevOps cult classic The Phoenix Project, did give us a slight scare by suggesting that adopting DevOps would make all tech employees’ lives easier, to the extent even the BOFH would no longer have anything to be angry about.

Sceptics will argue that adopting DevOps, Agile, and other California-baked paradigms, might be a cinch at smaller startups or companies like Google or Amazon with virtually unlimited cash to build over any greenfield site they choose. Traditional organisations, by comparison, will always have to struggle with years of legacy technology and hierarchy, as well as the immediate business problem.

Kim, speaking to us ahead of his debut conference in the UK, The DevOps Enterprise Summit, accepted this, saying: “So much of the narrative is around the unicorns – Google, Facebook, Amazon.”

But he continued, research he has conducted with Jez Humble, showed “The same principles and patterns are emerging in large complex organisations, like lv, HMRC and News UK.” (All of whom will be speaking at the conference, unsurprisingly.)

“These are organisations that have been around for over a century [or more] and are getting these same miraculous outcomes typically only achieved by Facebook, Google, and Amazon.”

The majority of technology workers are in organisations that look more like lv or Barclays than they do like Google, he said, hence upgrading their development and deployment processes, would mean “elevation of productivity that would result in macroeconomic level changes.”

And it doesn't necessarily mean junking all the legacy infrastructure.

“We can make every engineer, whether dev, test, ops, infosec, as productive as if they were working at a Google, Amazon and Netflix,” said Kim. The mind boggles at what could happen if HMRC was as efficient at extracting cash from taxpayers as Amazon.

Given the traditional nature of such organisations, though, many might assume these changes are best achieved by stealth. DevOps acolytes often like to talk about bottom-up revolutions. Not so fast, argues Kim: an analysis of speakers at the conferences showed the three top titles were director of ops, director of development, or chief architect.

The last was particularly eye-catching, he said. “At Tripwire [where Kim was a co-founder] we were always trained to ignore the architects. They were ones who just draw pretty pictures in Visio once a year then go back to their ivory tower.”

That the architects were driving transformation was a surprise, he said. “In these large organisations that are so functionally oriented, often the only people who see the end to end problem are the architects – everyone else, they just see the tickets coming out of the ticketing machine and say ‘hey I don’t see a problem’.”

Talking of ivory towers, Kim added that, to US eyes, European organisational culture at first might appear more staid and hierarchical.

But, he continued, there is “no doubt in my mind they are as radical and irreverent in these case studies as in the States.”

The problems are usually universal, and so should the solutions, he said. “It’s about the technical practices and having an architecture that allows small teams to independently develop, test and deploy their code and deliver value to customers, and that transcends national boundaries and continents.”

Just to underline Kim’s grasp of British tech culture, he mentions that a lot of people made a connection between his book The Phoenix Project and the Reg’s own Bastard Operator from Hell – the latter of which obviously predates the DevOps wave.

“The ops of DevOps is really creating those systems where we create those people – when people are trapped in a system that [produces] failure, studies have shown that [the result is] fatigue, burnout and cynicism. I think we’ve all met people like the Bastard Operator.”

So, Kim will feel his mission is complete when The Reg feels compelled to retire the BOFH? “Oh, I would never do that…”

Which is just as well. Because if the BOFH didn’t exist, we’d only have to invent him. ®