Tag Archives: cloud

Chickens not Cattle and definitely not Pets. Or maybe Bees

A few weeks ago I was ruminating on Twitter about the “Cattle not Pets” metaphor for Cloud instances.

I started a vague blog draft on the topic, got a little sidetracked and never fully completed the thought. But it’s something that’s itched at me for some time now. Cattle do in fact get fairly individualised treatment, except on the largest of scales. So they’re not a great metaphor. But I didn’t really have a perfect replacement So when I wandered into the office this morning and checked Twitter, I was gratified to see that Jeffrey Snover had tweeted out an article ruminating on basically the same topic, and which did a lot of the agricultural thinking for me.

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Stop Thinking About Servers

Every so often I get a request, from one or more of our developers, for Remote Desktop access to the servers running their code – be it for troubleshooting, configuration or some other arcane purpose.

My answer is almost uniformly “no”.

WAT

“But surely,” says the cat “you’re a super-futuristic DevOps shop spoken of in breathless terms by national IT publications? Don’t you trust your developers??”

Of course we do. But…

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What isn’t DevOps?

I was sitting on twitter today and a stream of tweets rolled past that made me… a little annoyed at first, then sort of intrigued because of the amount of discussion and brain wrangling they triggered.

realdevops

To be fair to Chris, I agree with a lot of what he was saying in his Real DevOps stream. But I fear that among the good stuff were a few tweets were either worded badly or wildly off the mark. I’ll admit I was initially tempted to dissect individual tweets but I think it’s more interesting – and less churlish – to get the Yet Another What Is DevOps post out of the way.

So, let’s get one thing clear, and then I’ll get started. A lot of people don’t know what “Devops” actually means. Here’s what it is, and here’s an opportunity for you to get your “no it’s not” ready.

Devops is the application of lean manufacturing principles to the IT Lifecycle

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