DevOpsCon Spring 2019 Keynote -- Operations: the last Mile for DevOps

Learn how to overcome operational inefficiencies and improve workflow performance by embracing automation, self-service, and clear handoffs, and discover the strategies to reduce toil and increase value creation.

Key takeaways
  • Operations work is often overwhelmed, misaligned, and disconnected, with excessive toil and poor communication.
  • Silos, disconnects, and mismatches hinder efficiency and progress.
  • As organizations grow, they become more fragmented, with more cues, more toil, and more complexity.
  • Automation that doesn’t work or doesn’t scale can exacerbate problems.
  • Ops teams are often stuck in a downward spiral, constantly firefighting and re-fighting the same battles.
  • The root of many problems is the lack of shared responsibility and clear handoffs.
  • Toil is a significant problem, as manual work and partial work accumulation lead to decreased motivation and demotivation.
  • It’s not about adding more teams or people, but about getting rid of queues and promoting self-service, automation, and reusable human capacity.
  • Automation should be used to free up human capacity for more important, high-value work.
  • The concept of “Last Mile” applies to operations work, where it’s crucial to focus on the customer and directly impact value creation.
  • There’s a need to rethink workflows, bridge calls, and escalations to reduce toil and increase efficiency.
  • It’s essential to promote self-service, automation, and clear handoffs to reduce toil and create a more efficient, effective operations workflow.
  • The book “Seeking SRE” and the paper “The Four Horsemen of the Operations Apocalypse” provide insights into the challenges and opportunities facing operations teams.
  • Understanding the forces undermining operations work, such as toil, silos, and cues, is crucial to improving operations workflows and performance.
  • Documentation of true problems, issues, exceptions, and trouble tickets is essential for understanding and improving operations workflows.
  • The “context wagon” concept illustrates the importance of context and clear handoffs in operations work.
  • The idea that “Ops is in this very tough position, being told to go faster, open things up, go, go, go” is a common challenge facing many organizations.