Over the last couple years, there’s been a subtle shift in my responsibilities at my day job (and my interests in technology overall). I’ve been doing much less database development and administration work, and more general system architecture work. That’s harder to write up in blog posts than SQL code, so I’ve struggled with writing, but I want to get back into the habit. So excuse the choppiness, and let me try to put some thoughts on digital paper.
I’m pushing very hard for my company to adopt DevOps principles. There’s a lot of material out there about DevOps from the developer perspective, but there’s few resources for those of us on the operations side of the house. In a pure sense, there’s no such thing as sides, but in a regulated industry like healthcare or financial services, old walls are tough to break down, so they’re useful as organizational frameworks for general responsibilities. However, we are all developers, whether or not we sling code or manage infrastructure as code; the goal is to produce repeatable patterns and tools that allow growth and change.
Two great books that I’m reading right now are:
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The Practice of Cloud System Administration by Limoncelli, Chalup, and Hogan. Tons of practical advice for building large-scale distributed processing systems, and DevOps philosophy is woven throughout (and specifically highlighted in Chapter 8). This is one of those books that you’ll feel like diving in on some sections, and skimming over others; it’s a through examination of system administration from development through implementation, so there’s lots of conceptual hooks to grab hold of (and conversely, things that you may not have experienced). |
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The second book that I’ve recently started reading is Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems. This book is a collection of essays which explore Google’s method of approaching reliability; like most things Google, Site Reliability Engineering is similar to DevOps, but specific to the ways that Google does thing. It’s also light on documentation (insert joke about Google and beta products here). However, it does offer several insights into day-to-day system administration at Google. While the SRE model is not exactly like DevOps, there’s lots of overlap, and differences may be attributed more to practice than to concepts. |
More to come.