"Operations"
You keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means
Avishai Ish-Shalom (@nukemberg)
What's wrong with this picture?
1961 - Mercury-Redstone 3
Mercury-Atlas
Mercury-Atlas 6
The Designers & The Operators
Astronauts are not enough
- Training
- Mission planning
- "Space vehicle CM"
- Mission control
- Ground Ops
- Systems engineering
And much more...
Of course, we don't fly to space
What is your org mission?
Hints:
Your mission is NOT to write code
Your mission is NOT to run servers
Your mission is NOT to store data
The "System" is
- Servers
- Code
- Data
- Clients
Individually they are meaningless
Operations: using components to achieve the mission
Alternate version
Extracting value from assets
Why do we need Operations Engineering?
(and operators)
The world is complex
Our systems are complex
We can't predict everything up front
- No design is perfect
- The inconceivable DOES happen
- Systems need to adapt to a changing world
Duct tape & glue
Over time, Operational cost will trump all other costs
- Andrew Clay-Shafer
Short history of (modern) Operations Engineering
Taylorims
AKA "Scientific Management"
- Gantt - scheduling
- The Hawthorne studies
- Erlang - Queueing Theory
WW2
- The Allies are desparate to improve production and logistics
- Allied governments recruit physicists, mathematicians and engineers to Operations Research groups
- After the war these people go on to reform civilian manufacturing
The beast from the East
Taiichi Ohno and Edward Deming revolutionize manufacturing
- Toyota Production System
- Lean
- JIT
- Statistical Process Control
- Total Quality Management
- Six Sigma
And much more
The Computer age
- The rise of Services organizations
- ERP & IT systems
- Computer simulations
Systems Engineering
With great power comes great complexity
What do Operations Engineers do?
Monitoring
- Is the system working?
- What do clients experience?
- Where is the problem?
Business Continuity
- Continued operation despite failure
- Recovering from disasters
Lifecycle management
- Scaling
- Capacity planning
- Maintain SLA/QoS
- Add/remove/upgrade components
- Adapt the service
Configuration & Asset Management
- What do we own? where is it?
- Parts need to be adapted to field conditions and other parts
- Tune for a changing world
- Multiple modes of operation
Blackboxes
- Extract maximum value from blackboxes
- Work around limitations
- Configurations
- Handle malfunctions
- Build operational knowledge
In short, we have a pet
The birth and transformation of IT Ops
Corporate IT
Then came SaaS
- Online services became the core business
- Needed high SLA
- Operational cost killed companies
- Web scale
Operations is about running a business
- Competitive edge
- Must have business context
- It ain't about servers
Questions?
"Operations": You keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means
By Avishai Ish-Shalom
"Operations": You keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means
#DevOps, #NoOps, #serverless - every few years yet another movement to get rid of those pesky Ops engineers no one likes pops up. But like cockroaches, we can’t seem to be able to get rid of the buggers. Can it be we just don’t really understand what “operations” is all about? When people hear “Operations”, they think of managing servers, of automation, CI and deployment pipelines. But Operations is not about any of that - operations is about making the machines you built/purchased/programmed earn money (or whatever the goal of the organization is). Making your business work is what operations is about. This presentation introduces the principles and history of Operations Engineering, the challenges and responsibilities of practitioners and the transformations IT Ops world is experiencing in recent years.
