Reviews and Comments

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.