Yesterday out in Boulder, Colorado, I hosted the first Camp DevOps held in partnership with Glue Conference 2014 (Glue is today if you are in the Denver/Boulder area). It was a great conference with a whole bunch of great sessions on different aspects of DevOps.
I love attending events like this because it gives me a chance to speak to large numbers of people and learn what questions and topics are important to people. DevOps is one of the hottest trends in IT today. I am the editor of DevOps.com, so of obviously I'm very attuned to this topic.
One thing that still makes me laugh is the people who look for magic bullets to transform their organization into a DevOps-powered company. Some folks think there is a magic tool that will give you DevOps, or better yet, you can get DevOps in a box.
I guess it really is not that unusual. I ran in to many people who used to think (some still do) that there was a magic bullet that would make your systems secure as well. But the idea of being able to buy some boxed up DevOps is just a joke to those who actually practice and are involved in the DevOps market. Of course, I expect there will be no shortage of snake salesmen who will try to sell some such concoction.
My friends at ScriptRock, Steve Hall, Mike Baukes and Alan Sharp-Paul, had a satirical video done about DevOps in a box. Below are some screen shots of the video. If you want to get a chuckle, go check out the whole video. Make sure you have your volume on as the lyrics are pretty funny.
So next time anyone tries to tell you they can give you DevOps in a box or for that matter any technology in a box remember this video, chuckle and tell them thanks, but no thanks.
The question of what is DevOps though is still being debated by some, as evidenced at Camp DevOps discussions yesterday. I am in agreement with what my friend Rajat Bhargava, CEO of JumpCloud presented yesterday at Camp DevOps. Raj said that DevOps does not equal tools. DevOps starts with a culture and philosophy on how an organization operates. DevOps is not about developers alone, nor is DevOps just about Dev and Ops. DevOps is about getting closer to your customer and delivering better products and services faster. It should involve your entire organization.
I guess in the end DevOps is not much different than other IT trends and maybe even life in general. There will always be people looking to do it the easy way, people looking to take short cuts, people looking for "it in a box". Those people will be preyed upon by hucksters like the two slick dudes in the video.
I hope you don't fall into that category. Beware of people selling DevOps or for that matter anything in a box.