Do Serverless and Abstract Architectures Have a Place in DevOps?

Nov 9th, 2017 12:17pm by Scott M. Fulton III

Do Serverless And Abstract Architectures Have A Place In DevOps?

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Maybe there is no single path to DevOps nirvana and no one way of implementing continuous integration. That’s the eye-opening conclusion reached by Nicole Forsgren, Founder and CEO of DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), in a wide-ranging conversation for The New Stack Makers podcast recorded at PagerDuty Summit 2017 in San Francisco.

Technology such as serverless architecture, she said, may very well abstract away the details of operations from the task of software development. But if it all ends up delivering positive value for end users and customers, Forsgren asks, then who cares how DevOps is done? The co-author of the State of DevOps report, published annually by Puppet, goes so far as to suggest that for any two organizations, DevOps may not have one state.

“Much of our work should be done manually. If I’m a coder, I should be doing novel, innovative interesting, creative, value-add work,” Forsgren said. “But the things that are rote, that are predictable… let’s automate that as much as possible so I free up my time to add value to my organization.”

In This Edition:

2:20: Exploring the key insights from the State of DevOps 2017 report.
4:50: How DORA researched the amount of manual work that companies do, rather than the automation.
12:08: What could operators be doing if configuration management was made more automated than it was?
18:13: Are we stepping away from the goal of DevOps?
22:35: Re-imagining Ops and dev work to reach an end goal of creating value for customers.
25:16: The challenge for organisations to embrace DevOps concepts and standardize around tools and technology.

Scott M. Fulton, III is a 39-year veteran technology journalist, author, analyst, and content strategist, the latter of which means he thought almost too carefully about the order in which those roles should appear. Decisions like these, he’ll tell you,...