Let’s begin with automated deployments

This blog is about my journey into DevOps which will be initially focussed on automated deployments.

Primary goals:

• increased efficiency
• decreased risk

How many companies have you worked at that had the new developers spend the first week (or even weeks) setting up their environments. Or how many quickly thrown together environments did you have to use to either develop on or verify the bug fix on?

Secondary goals:

• unified tooling
• unified processess

The DevOps teams (development, technology operations and quality assurance) should leverage as many of the same tools and processes. After all we want to minimize the throwing over the wall mentality common in our industry and business in general.

Note that I will be striving for the simplest solution that does the job. I do not want to rely on additional servers, or black boxes. If I do not have the ability to adapt it for our needs then that will be a big negative factor in the selection process. If we already know the language that a tool is made from then that will be a positive factor. Chef and Puppet, though great enterprise solutions, are IMHO overly complex for those places that can count the number of servers on their hands.

Let the journey begin…