Another inch up the curve… As before, there are notes so that you can be selective with your reading and there are * against the reads to maybe prioritise if you’re hard pressed for time.

• Enterprise DevOps – The Opportunity & The Challenge (Benjamin Wootton) -> A concise slide deck that could act as a guide to your own talking points if facilitating an ‘Intro to DevOps’ session.
• Common Objections to DevOps from Enterprise Operations (Dev2Ops) -> “The quickened pace puts a lot more pressure on the centralized ops team because they often get the work late in the project cycle (i.e. when it’s time to release to production). Because of time pressure or because they are over worked, operations teams have difficulty turning requested work around and begin to hear developers want to do things for themselves….. unfortunately, a centralized devops team can become a silo and suffer from the same “late in the cycle” handoff challenges the traditional ops group sees.  -> A practical view of the kind of situation ‘Agile‘ can create on the Ops side when it’s mainly Dev pushing a cultural shift towards DevOps. *
• Include Ops people in user stories for Operability (HighOps) -> “Many organisations use terminology which is unhelpful and counter-productive towards Operability”
• The Continuous Delivery Maturity Model (InfoQ) -> Taking five key categories, Culture & Organisation, Design & Architecture, Build & Deploy, Test & Verification and Information & Reporting, the aim of this article is to establish a method of measurement for where an organisation is with ‘Continuous X’.  This particular model defines five maturity levels: base, beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert.  Measuring against this model can help you to work out how best to support your customer.  Image available. *
• Two Ways DevOps Unlocks the True Potential of Agile (devops.com) -> “The good news is, organizations can close their gaps and realize the true value of Agile development by incorporating DevOps processes and tools into their systems development life cycle (SDLC)… The DevOps principle to employ here is getting the operations team involved in testing earlier in the SDLC – essentially shifting their work left – and the tool that can help is service virtualisation”.  This article is effectively saying if Ops are involved earlier in the SDLC then they can help get QA/testing environments as close to a real-world Production environment as possible and monitor the whole SDLC.  This is advantageous when considering the implications of Continuous Delivery and Deployment. “By simulating constrained or unavailable systems across the SDLC, service virtualization enables developers, testers and performance teams to work in parallel for faster delivery and higher application quality and reliability”
• DevOps and Change Control (sdncentral) -> A rhetoric and some guidance on ‘if everything’s constantly changing, how do we manage and track the change?’
• Why DevOps Matters To The CIO (contino) -> “technology that can be used to innovate and succeed in a competitive marketplace… the challenge of delivering technology that enables their business to succeed… DevOps is a movement and set of best practices that has a lot of value for the CIO who is operating against this backdrop.”  Effectively a DevOps sales pitch to a CIO. *
• How to Celebrate DevOps Success (ranger4) -> “So what might a DevOps SMART goal look like?” Metrics and rewards acting as a stimulus for successful DevOps…?  Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness (SCARF) needs to be looked at in each person’s role/group of people in the eyes of this writer.
• DevOps: The Operational Amplifier (DevOps Journal) -> “Maintenance windows exist in the enterprise, after all, to manage expectations with respect to downtime and disruption specifically because of the interdependent nature of enterprise applications…..The thing is, these numbers are only going to get worse as the Internet of Things continues to put pressure on organisations”  This article takes a look at the unaligned growth of IT services vs. the people operating said services.  DevOps can be the tool, the ‘amplifier’ to allow a few Ops folks to manage a world of [near] exponential growth.  “That means APIs – strong APIs – as well as extensibility and flexibility. Infrastructure cannot remain rigid and static in an environment that is rapidly changing. It must be dynamically configured, extensible, and imminently flexible.” *
• Testing in a Continuous Delivery world (SD Times – Rob Marvin) -> “If there’s one overarching principle, it’s to automate everything”  This article gives a good indication of the anticipated push of automation through the entire stack from a SDLC perspective.  We at Cisco talk about automating at an infrastructure level but tying full software revision control inclusive of infrastructure services is where things are heading… i.e. Regression testing is mentioned in this article – if I regress my software, I’d like to regress the infrastructure state below it… in an automated fashion…