Hardcover, 343 pages
English language
Published Jan. 20, 2013 by IT Revolution Press.
The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win is the third book by Gene Kim. The business novel tells the story of an IT manager who has ninety days to rescue an over-budget and late IT initiative, code-named The Phoenix Project.
It’s a good way to introduce business and DevOps concepts to folks new to them from either direction. My biggest complaint is that in service of that mission, the storytelling plays out somewhere between a bad case of “plot armor” and “wish fulfillment”.
Reading this book felt like a dejavu. So many situations the authors describe have happened almost exactly as they describe them. We've made the same mistakes and hopefully have learned from them. It's very well written and relatable. Especially people who've not have worked for 20 years in the industry might find this an interesting read to possibly understand certain situations and avoid some of the mistakes we all use to make along our way.
The Phoenix Project is a seminal read on the accumulation of thoughts and processes surrounding DevOps as we know it today. The story is a fictional take on a workplace that is rife with unplanned work and misuse of the process. You might find it similar to something you see in your organization. It has some great insights and relevant stories you can apply to your own practices. In 2020, these things should be less and less relevant, but in fact, they seem to be more relevant than ever with COVID-19 and companies shifting more and more to the cloud with their digital transformation, demanding quicker time to market, just like Parts Unlimited in the book. The characters used in the book are great, and the protagonist gets the shake at the end. I can't help but think one of the characters, Wes, is a bit over the top. To …
The Phoenix Project is a seminal read on the accumulation of thoughts and processes surrounding DevOps as we know it today. The story is a fictional take on a workplace that is rife with unplanned work and misuse of the process. You might find it similar to something you see in your organization. It has some great insights and relevant stories you can apply to your own practices. In 2020, these things should be less and less relevant, but in fact, they seem to be more relevant than ever with COVID-19 and companies shifting more and more to the cloud with their digital transformation, demanding quicker time to market, just like Parts Unlimited in the book. The characters used in the book are great, and the protagonist gets the shake at the end. I can't help but think one of the characters, Wes, is a bit over the top. To summarize, it's a great read on how you and your organization can start thinking about bringing Development and Operations people closer together and get their decisions aligned, ultimately leading to more quality output and faster.
Honestly, it reminds me of an Ayn Rand book.
For every time I'm impressed how calm, kind and reasonable the protagonist is, there's another time how I'm shocked at how vindictive and petty the book (if not the protagonist directly) is to the people that seem to be standing in the way of the protagonist. Right now, it's security professionals, but a couple of chapters ago it was project managers, then developers, and then the CEO. No-one in those departments has any sympathy for the protagonist, nor is there a screw up (so far) that was clearly internal to the Ops team -- they are just apparently perfect at their job. And don't get me started on the complaints about how dingy the offices are next to HR (when part of HR's job is trying to make people feel comfortable, and those offices are part of the job description).
Oh, …
Honestly, it reminds me of an Ayn Rand book.
For every time I'm impressed how calm, kind and reasonable the protagonist is, there's another time how I'm shocked at how vindictive and petty the book (if not the protagonist directly) is to the people that seem to be standing in the way of the protagonist. Right now, it's security professionals, but a couple of chapters ago it was project managers, then developers, and then the CEO. No-one in those departments has any sympathy for the protagonist, nor is there a screw up (so far) that was clearly internal to the Ops team -- they are just apparently perfect at their job. And don't get me started on the complaints about how dingy the offices are next to HR (when part of HR's job is trying to make people feel comfortable, and those offices are part of the job description).
Oh, and Erik, the DevOps zen-master Mary Sue. He's just not credible as a character. Sure, he may exist, but he just doesn't know the protagonist well enough to be able to say the things he says. I'm secretly hoping he's Tyler Durden.
Finished it.
I am very, very surprised at how "Continuous Delivery" is jammed into the back.
I am very surprised by the comments that Bill (the protagonist) has about the developers.
I am downright astonished that the development team of a large corporation is capable of setting up a repeatable testable environment based on VM within weeks, can move to a cloud based solution like Amazon AWS, and put together a push-button packaged deployable solution to production and some how the operations guy gets the credit for that.
I've worked as an e-commerce consultant for more than a decade, and even at places like Twitter it takes months of effort to do that. And it's completely brushed aside as something the developers can just "do" as soon as it's mentioned to them.
It should have taken a solid year. It should have bottlenecked their critical resource, Brent, for a year. The same can be said of the job they did going through Kanban and the change process -- it would have taken a consultant months of getting everyone on-board and then even longer to get people not to fall into old habits, but somehow Bill comes back after a weekend and his team has already sorted everything. It's dishonest, and it presents a distorted view of how much work it can be to change and how much fear peopl can have of change, especially the threats of outsourcing and company liquidations.
I am utterly shocked at how John, the security guy, has a meltdown, gets drunk, and then and becomes an evangelist for Bill. It's bizarre, especially when you consider his approach. Ask Etsy about their e-commerce functionality and then ask Etsy whether they could get by without their security team. It's not even dishonest... it's disrespectful.
Read Continuous Integration and Beyond Software Architecture. Call in Opscode or another devops company to do a consult. Start sending out your ops guys to conferences. Just please, please, please, don't take this book literally. It's fiction. It makes Ayn Rand look realistic.
And that's all I have to say about that.
