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Reddit mentions of The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

Sentiment score: 15
Reddit mentions: 26

We found 26 Reddit mentions of The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. Here are the top ones.

The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
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Found 26 comments on The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win:

u/2fbysea · 61 pointsr/sysadmin

This is a great read as well. Highly recommend. A good insight into devops.

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

u/numbersnut · 22 pointsr/talesfromtechsupport

I feel like this story could be a whole sequel to The Phoenix Project.

u/ghostalker47423 · 9 pointsr/sysadmin

We're in the opening stages of buying out a large company. Similar sized (international, thousands of employees, dozens of sites all over the place) to us; but naturally there's months of procedure before the buyout is complete. Gov't approval, shareholders vote, board voting, etc. I'm not allowed to communicate with my counterparts at the incoming company, but have contacts in other industries that do business with both of us. I got word a couple weeks ago that their entire team in a specific IT specialty is quitting. They're all scared that my company is going to fire them all as soon as the ink dries.

First off, nothing could be further from the truth. My company may be an outlier, but we do lots of M&As every year; tempted to say 1-2 a month. Mostly small shops, but every now and then we bag a big one like this. Vulture capitalism is a real thing, but it makes up a very very small amount of buyout and mergers. You're still right to be scared, people are always fearful of change. Buying a new house/car, moving to a new place, taking a new job, etc. Perfectly natural.

I'll take a minute to hit on your core concerns:

> Everything I look after is old

So what? If the old hardware is still meeting its requirements in the production environment, that's fine. It's nice to have newer stuff, but I've never seen management update hardware simply because it was "old". If it was constantly at risk of losing customer data, or had unsolvable security concerns, then upgrading it to newer hardware would make sense.

About 1/3rd of my environment (+1500 servers) is what I would call ancient.... but they're still running. Supporting apps that customers use. Preforming some special process that needs specific hardware/software. In some cases, the team that owned the hardware was divested years ago and nobody told us to turn off their shit when they left. It kinda common. During the merger process, everything will be inventoried and documented, including what the server is actually doing (ie: hosting). This is where the curtain is lifted and suddenly we don't need to keep all these boxes running. The ones that do need to stay will get P2V'ed or V2V'd to better systems, if there's a reason it can't stay in its current environment.

> I get the feeling we're kept here temporarily to keep the old stuff running.

Yes, of course you are. Who else? Your team has the knowledge and experience keeping it all running. You're kinda stuck in a holding pattern though. Until the merger is complete, you can't get a job at the new company, and you can't move up at your current one. If you quit your job, you wont get a place at the new company, even if you fit the bill.

At my place, we do very little external hiring, and even then only for esoteric positions (IE: Lync Engineer, Sharepoint admin, Citrix, etc). M&A's are the primary source of our onboarding. Not just because you have experience with the current systems that the company is inheriting as part of the merger; but because you've played an important role in making your current company attractive to mine, which is what lead to the buyout. If your IT systems were shit, and always crashing/losing data, your company wouldn't have grown to the point where it'd be attractive to buy it out. Also, you're keeping these ancient systems running? Nice... obviously you know what you're doing.

Which brings me to the next part... have you met anyone from the new company's HR team yet? We always send in a team of people (directors, HR, advisors) to meet with the employees of the newly acquired company. Figure out who are the good apples and who are bad. Who knows what they're talking about and who is just faking it for the paycheck. If you haven't met with the other company yet, I'd strongly advise you to not jump ship yet. You could be throwing away an excellent opportunity just because you're scared of the pending change.

> Management is off-site.

This is perfectly normal. My manager is 1000mi away, and I only talk to him over Lync/email. Somehow we take care of all our datacenters, around the world, without having to see each other in person. But hey, this is the 21st century and this is how it works. The best people for the job may not live within 50mi of your office, but are within range of another office. If you need someone sitting in the same building to give you guidance on what needs to be done, then you need to ask yourself why. It shouldn't matter if your orders come over an email, a voicemail, or a sit-down meeting. In my experience, having remote management makes the subordinates much more responsible. They're allowed to get their job done their way, in their time (as long as it meets the metric of success), and then report success over an email/chat/call. Almost everyone I've met loves this kind of system. Much more laid back then say, a micromanaging boss who hovers over your desk and asks for constant updates.

> Pay is low, turnover rate high

This too is normal during your M&A. Accounting doesn't want to introduce extra financial liabilities for the new parent company, because it can throw off their forecasting models. Don't be surprised if you get the bare minimum until about ~6mo after the ink dries on the merger. This applies to new hardware, facilities requests, bonuses, perks, etc. It's not a bad sign... but it can be bad for morale. My suggestion is to just suck it up, because you're not going to win a fight with the accountants.

> Change management is more strict.

Get used to this in larger companies. Can you imagine the chaos of hundreds/thousands of people with their hands in thousands of servers? If a customer app goes down at 9am without CC, how do you figure out who did what where? Was it the app owners doing a code change? Was it the network team upgrading a switch? Was it security rolling out an update to the firewall? Change control saves your ass. I was befuddled by the process too when I started, but they've made a believer out of me.

Why should the company wake up 100 people in the middle of the night, to play Sherlock Holmes in the environment, looking for what has changed, because some developer made an opps?

[Also, if you've never read The Phoenix Project, I strongly recommend it. It'll give you a look at how a company without change control "tries" to get things done, and then you can see how change control, once properly implemented, makes everyone's lives soooooo much easier].

> What to do?

Nothing you've done at this point has been unreasonable. Like I said before, your reaction to the change in your company will naturally cause feelings of fear, anticipation, anxiety; which leads to second-guessing and the sense of flight. Your paycheck is at risk, which puts food on the table, gas in your car, and a roof over your head. Totally normal to be up late at night wondering what the future holds.

I'd suggest you get your CV updated... and also put together a portfolio. If/when the new company comes to visit, they'll want to meet with the team who has kept everything running and see if they can be integrated into the new company. You're not re-interviewing for your current job a la 'Office Space', they want to see if you can provide extra value to the company if given the chance. This is where you impress them with how you saved the day keeping X-system online, or how you automated something that used to take days, into minutes. Things like that.

I would NOT suggest signing a 1yr committal on a new lease with the intention of staying with the company. My advice is from someone who has sat on the other side of the table, and while I'm painting you a rosy picture because you've given me no reason to think less of you.... I will state that someone people will be laid off. Duplicate positions, fakers, incompatible team members, etc. Not everyone makes the cut. If you're a decent worker who can be taught new tricks, odds are on your side of being "asked" to join the new company (where you'll still do your current job, and take on more responsibility for a while, until we can find a way to reduce your criticality to the old entity).


tl;dr - Fear of uncertainty is normal. You don't have the full picture of what's going on behind the scenes. You'll see the writing on the wall IF layoffs are coming. Don't do anything rash.

u/Zaphod_B · 7 pointsr/sysadmin

I sort of am on the fence of recommending these books but have you read?

  • Phoenix Project link

  • Art of the Start link

  • The hard Truth link

    Learning how businesses work definitely improves your tech skills. It helps build logic based around what is best for the business, not what is best for IT, or what is best for you. Learning how IT becomes a finely tuned oiled machine for your business is even better.

    I have read some of the books on start ups and business so I can understand where they come from, what they are trying to accomplish as a business.

    The soft skills will come as you work with more and more people. Just always try to walk into a situation as a neutral part, listen, observe, learn and don't be a jerk. The soft skills will develop pretty easily that way
u/macinmypocket · 6 pointsr/networking

Definitely check out The Phoenix Project. I'm about halfway through it now and am really enjoying it!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0988262509/

u/YuppieFerret · 6 pointsr/sysadmin

It's like Sarah jumped straight out of the book.

u/HotterRod · 6 pointsr/NoStupidQuestions

You're not reading the right books. Very few people need to know about buses and registers. Try reading some books about computers that are written for a general audience by journalists. Some examples:

u/michaelandrews · 3 pointsr/devops

This is a great (and short) introduction to what the DevOps mentality is. You and your boss should read it before you start hiring "DevOps Engineers".

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0988262509?keywords=devops%20books&qid=1457046991&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

It's not a "thing" but a philosophy on making sure Developers and Operations (SysAdmins) work together within your organization.

u/Onisake · 3 pointsr/scrum

>Problems arising in development for which we have trouble finding or creating a good solution. This may take a few extra hours but in some cases it has taken days to figure some things out, and this is time that is 'unaccounted for' because these tasks have specific hours/points assigned to them.

This is an issue with planning. Things can and do happen, but if they are happening frequently you have an issue with planning.

One thing you can try to do is assign a 'champion' to each ticket during the first discussion. (backlog grooming usually) The champion is responsible for gathering all the needed information and essentially the go-to person for understanding what needs to be completed and all of the dependencies. This person should also work with product to break an epic or story into the appropriate scope and subtasks. If a problem does arise, this is the person responsible for working with relevant stake holders to come up with a potential solution to take to the group.

>Time spent going back and fixing previously-completed components when new components break them. Our app is comprised of many components that work off of each other and sometimes changes to one either break another one or require some further changes to other ones to prevent breakage.

This is another planning issue. if you have to frequently go back and fix stuff that was completed then you didn't accurately capture the dependencies. (or someone else released something without checking your dependencies. still an issue with planning, just maybe not yours)

This is harder to fix. a champion can alleviate this to a degree, but it depends on the nature of the dependency. either way, not enough communication is going on.

>From the UI side, going back and fixing/updating/improving components that were functionally in a completed state. This one doesn't take up much time, but it is still not 'tasked' time.

Then task it. you should be capturing as much of your work on paper as possible.

if UI is outside of your team, it should be accounted for as a dependency the team is responsible for.

Again, not enough communication is going on. UI people should be part of your planning and you should be accounting for this time.

>The biggest problem comes when we have to make changes to multiple components simultaneously because they share functionality or work together, and this appears to cause a delay because 'neither of them are being completed on schedule'.

guess what I'm going to say. :p

sounds like you need to work with your SM to re-establish communication chains. they aren't there.

>We are all talented developers and we know what we are doing, but the seemingly 'results-driven' approach of SCRUM is not making a lot of sense to us right now, and morale is low.

your SM doesn't know what he's doing, sadly. Sounds like a converted PM that hasn't crested the learning curve yet. It sucks that Morale is low. You can do things to help him out and keep morale high. unfortunately this also depends on his willingness to accept the fact he doesn't know what he's doing.

You should really sit down with your SM and talk to him about this. It's his job to remove impediments. low morale is an impediment. how do your retro's go?

One of my favorite stories to tell, is one of the first retro's I was observing. (normally only the team should be present, but we made an exception for training purposes. I was there to observe, not to add) The company I was at was in the middle of a transition to Agile. They weren't prepared to hire dedicated SMs, so we were training within and having volunteers be SMs on teams temporarily.

Anyway, during the course of the retro, the team talked about how the current SM was not meshing well with the team, and wasn't really embodying Agile/Scrum as everyone else understood it. They decided in the Retro that the SM wasn't right for the team, and they needed a new one. So that's what they did, switched SMs right in the middle of the retro.

>Sometimes unexpected and time-consuming shit happens, and tasks cannot be completed 100% in one sitting. It just doesn't make sense to me. Can someone please explain how to handle these scenarios?

This largely depends on the group and the environment. if things are changing as frequently as you say, and they always will, then you should explore other models than Scrum. Specifically lean/kanban is better suited to volatile environments.

Within Scrum, when an event occurs that drastically changes the scope of a sprint you're supposed to bust the sprint. This is, by design, a painful process. you should immediately go into retrospective. talk about what went wrong. go into planning and re-establish baseline. figure out what the team can get done with this new information and restart the iteration.

Again, this is painful by design because it is a last resort. if these events happen frequently, then there's something else going on that needs to be addressed and talked about. mostly because you lose two days every time you bust a sprint. it paints a giant target on you that screams 'we didn't have our crap together. so now we have to go back and get our crap together' and no-one likes that. This is the main mechanism used to 'force' a team to fix their problems. granted, most SMs and most companies don't bust sprints even when things are going very poorly. but this is what scrum has in place for what you described. (so start doing it.)

In reality, Scrum tries to prevent these scenarios by enforcing better habits around planning and commitments. if you're new to scrum, or don't understand it yet, this can be extremely chaotic as Scrum assumes you have certain things already worked out. Scrum training generally does a woefully inadequate job of explaining this. the point is to highlight your main problem areas so you can fix them.

It's doing that very well. you've identified your time sinks. have some problems. Scrum's job is done. now it's your turn. talk about the issues as a team and figure out a solution based on the context of your environment (team/project/company/organization).

-------------

Recommended reading:

Phoenix Project: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509

Crucial Conversations: https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Talking-Stakes-Second/dp/0071771328/

Lean from the Trenches: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Trenches-Managing-Large-Scale-Projects/dp/1934356859/

When you're ready for something more advanced:

Tribal Leadership: https://www.amazon.com/Tribal-Leadership-Leveraging-Thriving-Organization/dp/0061251321/

Toyota Production System: https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Production-System-Beyond-Large-Scale/dp/0915299143/

Lean Software Development: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Software-Development-Agile-Toolkit/dp/0321150783/

Note: This last book is 'advanced' mostly because of price. It's worth it.

u/Calevara · 3 pointsr/suggestmeabook

Don't know what specific field you are in, but if you have an IT focus at all I STRONGLY recommend the Phoenix Project by Gene Kim and Kevin Behr. It's a non fiction approach to IT management wrapped in a fictional story. Anyone who has worked in any sort of IT related field will relate strongly to the first half of the book.

u/Trospar · 3 pointsr/devops

Both you and your boss should read this "fictional book" so that you are both on the same page.

The Phoenix project is the best description of the problem that devops is trying to solve IMHO.

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484364343&sr=8-1&keywords=phoenix+project

u/VA_Network_Nerd · 3 pointsr/ITCareerQuestions

Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks


As you move up the org chart to manage larger segments of the IT staff, your ability to influence projects and priorities obviously increases.

An MBA is seldom a wrong answer in these roles, but a complete degree isn't always required - depending on the employer.
But a complete understanding of the budget cycle and CapEx / OpEx is essential.

IT Infrastructure Teams have two budgeting priorities:

  1. Maintenance & Life-Cycle planning for the stuff we already have.
  2. Planning to meet the needs of the business for the upcoming budget cycle.

    You must maintain some form of relationship or communications channel with the business and app Teams to keep an eye on what they are working on.

    ITIL, Agile, and to some extent CISSP, or PMP can all help ensure you have the correct vocabulary, which can help you keep doing the things you already know need to be done.

    I just finished reading The Phoenix Project and I'd say its a worthwhile read for all of IT management - and the business counterparts too. It helped me wrap my mind around the impact of Docker and Containers, so now I think I see what all the excitement is about.


u/TotesFabulous · 2 pointsr/suggestmeabook

Not a tech book exactly but check out the Phoenix Project. It is a fictional story about a IT manager that becomes the Director of IT in a tanking business. It is fictional but VERY informative when it comes to project management, especially if you plans to manage a team. It talks about how to handle problems in the tech world and how to interact with other departments. Very good story.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0988262509/ref=cm_sw_su_dp

u/dailydishabille · 2 pointsr/sysadmin

The team I'm on is somewhat unique in our organization and we have been using a modified and always evolving Kanban method.

Our choice to try Kanban came after having read The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim. We really loved the iterative feedback that a system like Kanban can provide.

We started with yarn and sticky notes on a whiteboard until we felt comfortable with the process and then migrated to Kanbanflow. We do individual task time tracking in Toggl.

We had played with bigger solutions targeted for VAR/MSPs but found that they also wanted to be CRM solutions (and a lot of other cruft that we didn't need). Basically, we were wasting our time trying to learn tools instead of processes.

Will we be using these solutions six months from now? Who knows. We are able to shift pretty easily between tools and like to be able to pick what we need. We tend towards simple, useful SaaS offerings that know what they want to provide and do it really well.

u/LeTexan_ · 2 pointsr/csharp

I'm still a young C# developper, around 3 years of C# for websites and APis for small and big companies, but it's not because your predecessors built an in-house framework that this is the right way to build a system. C# is a great language but it shine thanks to the core orientation of productivity delivered by the .NET framework and ASP.MVC.


Of course if your needs are so specifics that you want a custom framework, don't forget that it will become a HR problem. Talented people rarely want to jail themselves to a company and build a specific set of skills that can't be transferred.


But as I said, I'm young. I do think that we are living on the shoulders of giants and that not everything need to be rebuilt. Some of the coolest techs we've seen these past years around containers and micro-services were actually already implemented in the 70's.

That said, I didn't read this book, so I will read it and predictably learn a lot of things. If you didn't already, I would recommend the following books. They aren't C# specific but will help you in the environment you are describing:

u/paul_h · 2 pointsr/agile

http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Ops-Handbook-Implementing-Practical/dp/0975568612 by my boss Kevin Behr and his co-authors. Also http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509 by the same trio. In the latter the opposing factors of planned and unplanned work. Planned work, us in development would think of as stories, epics, etc in a card/wall/board centric app. Unplanned work: tickets in a incident/problem management app. You have to attend both of course, and work to minimize unplanned work. ThePhoenixProject is TheGoal but 30 years later and skewed towards IT (while still in a manufacturing company, with it's own bricks and mortar outlets), and contrasting planned and unplanned work, as I said. VisibleDevOps talks of ITIL, which ties in the "Managing IT operations" you were asking about.

u/volci · 2 pointsr/sysadmin

Sounds like a condensation of The Phoenix Project

u/Midnight_Moopflops · 1 pointr/sysadmin

Another "lunches" book to read after the first is Powershell Toolmaking in a month of lunches there's another book coming out on the matter of Scripting later this year.

Also, for reference see if you can get Powershell in Action

It was written by the man who architected and designed the bloody thing, so you're in good hands. I've not read it cover to cover, but it's certainly the definitive reference on the subject.

All above books rated 5/5 stars on amazon by a lot of people.

If you're so bogged down, stitched up and scared to even think about automating anything, then I'd absolutely recommend The Phoenix Project this is the paradigm shift IT has gone through over the past decade. Essentially, IT has taken on board efficiency and best practices that have been standard in the manufacturing industry for decades, to incredible success.

Seriously, "Bag of Nails" IT shops are on their way out. If they're that unwilling to take a step back and do things the smart way, they're a shit company to work for. Learn about technical debt and why it's critical to pay it off.

DevOps and Site Reliability are in essence the latest buzzwords in IT service management, but there's a lot of positive change going on in the industry off the back of it. There's a sort of productivity Gold Rush.

If you're bogged down your current job sounds like the perfect place to cut your teeth and leapfrog off the back of it to move into a better organisation who wants to work smart.

Have fun!

u/CSMastermind · 1 pointr/learnprogramming

Entrepreneur Reading List


  1. Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
  2. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
  3. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
  4. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
  5. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
  6. Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers
  7. Ikigai
  8. Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition
  9. Bootstrap: Lessons Learned Building a Successful Company from Scratch
  10. The Marketing Gurus: Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time
  11. Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web
  12. The Web Startup Success Guide
  13. The Best of Guerrilla Marketing: Guerrilla Marketing Remix
  14. From Program to Product: Turning Your Code into a Saleable Product
  15. This Little Program Went to Market: Create, Deploy, Distribute, Market, and Sell Software and More on the Internet at Little or No Cost to You
  16. The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
  17. The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
  18. Startups Open Sourced: Stories to Inspire and Educate
  19. In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters
  20. Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
  21. Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
  22. Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed
  23. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
  24. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
  25. Eric Sink on the Business of Software
  26. Words that Sell: More than 6000 Entries to Help You Promote Your Products, Services, and Ideas
  27. Anything You Want
  28. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers
  29. The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
  30. Tao Te Ching
  31. Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
  32. The Tao of Programming
  33. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
  34. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

    Computer Science Grad School Reading List


  35. All the Mathematics You Missed: But Need to Know for Graduate School
  36. Introductory Linear Algebra: An Applied First Course
  37. Introduction to Probability
  38. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  39. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society
  40. Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery
  41. What Is This Thing Called Science?
  42. The Art of Computer Programming
  43. The Little Schemer
  44. The Seasoned Schemer
  45. Data Structures Using C and C++
  46. Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
  47. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
  48. Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
  49. How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing
  50. A Science of Operations: Machines, Logic and the Invention of Programming
  51. Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology
  52. The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation
  53. The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine
  54. Computability: An Introduction to Recursive Function Theory
  55. How To Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method
  56. Types and Programming Languages
  57. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Elementary Algorithms
  58. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Mathematical Methods
  59. Commonsense Reasoning
  60. Using Language
  61. Computer Vision
  62. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
  63. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

    Video Game Development Reading List


  64. Game Programming Gems - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
  65. AI Game Programming Wisdom - 1 2 3 4
  66. Making Games with Python and Pygame
  67. Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python
  68. Bit by Bit
u/YuleTideCamel · 1 pointr/learnprogramming

Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble is considered to be the deployment bible. Lot's of good information here.

While, not a tech book per se, The Phoenix Project goes into reasons why we need devops,automation and focuses on the cultural shift that is DevOps. Folks assume that devops is something you do, it's not , it's a software culture that a company adopts that advocates rapid innovation via automation and shared ownership with no fences to throw code over. Everyone is responsible for the product , all the time. (DevOps is like Fitness, you don't do Fitness, you perform activities and make choices that lead to fitness)

Look into learning CI servers like Jenkins, Travis, CircleCI etc. They make automation a breeze. The key thing is to automate EVERYTHING. If a task takes a second, but still requires you type something or push a button automate it. You code can , and should, go from checking into source control all the way to production safely and reliability.

u/QuantumRiff · 1 pointr/sysadmin

I'm a big fan of Gene Kim. one of his books, the first half was a very gripping documentary about a former employer.. (at least I assume!)

u/ShiftyAsylum · 1 pointr/sysadmin

And if you haven't already, read "The Phoenix Project."

u/rjhintz · 1 pointr/devops

I'm not clear on the pipelines from developers' machines to production deployment, both today and as you'd propose given current restrictions.

Also, you might want to revisit your Vagrant/Ansible thoughts in the context of what your corporate peers are considering. It's not unreasonable that they are considering rearchitecting their current dev-->deployment strategy and you don't want to be seriously out of step with it to avoid a lot of wasted effort.

Of course, what you'd really want is to work collaboratively with your peers to come up with a strategy to iterate to a modern dev-->deployment workflow that everyone could use, targets Rackspace or generic public IaaS provider, and "breaks down some of the legacy silos" as the saying goes.

It's not irrational to think that the current restrictions could be rethought, You'd need to get the infosec, compliance, and bean counters on board. Needs exec sponsorship.

Have you read the Phoenix Project? Often cited as a starting place. Cheesy in spots, but an interesting read on the process. Not the detailed cookbook you were asking for, but those exist, too. Just need the earlier clarifications.

u/pooogles · 1 pointr/sysadmin

>How did you get started in DevOps?

I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT4. I realised this was the future and if you wanted to be in a high performing organisation you need to do what they're doing.

Unless you're in an organisation that is willing to undergo the cultural change of Operations and Development working together you're probably not going to go far. Creating a devops organisation from scratch is HARD unless everyone is on board.

Looking into the technology is the simple part, try reading around the movement. Pheonix Project (http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509) is a good start, from there I'd look into Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Continuous-Integration-Improving-Software-Signature/dp/0321336380 & https://www.amazon.co.uk/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912).

If by this point you don't know a programming language you're going to be in serious trouble. Learn something, be it Powershell (and honestly you probably will want to move onto C# if you want to be amazing at what you) or Python/Ruby.

Honestly you should be working towards what Google does with SRE if you want to be at the leading edge. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X.

u/mdavis00 · 1 pointr/AskNetsec

Read The Phoenix Project its a very well done narrative of the struggle of setting up quality change management. It goes from simple to culture changes, to proper CM practice.