The Cult of DevOps

packetrat writes "I was at OmniTI's Surge conference today, which turned out to be, among other things, a meeting of the cult of DevOps. Ars Technica covered the keynote and some of the presentations, but some of the best stuff is in the comments. Google CIO Ben Fried told the tale of a really poorly engineered trading application at Morgan Stanley that he was associated with, and how the way IT was structured there contributed to that engineering and to its spectacular failure, costing the bank untold millions in stock trade processing fees from its institutional customers. He said what he learned from cleaning up the mess has informed how Google runs its IT operations, and a culture that promotes generalist skills. A lot of how he describes Google's approach sounds like the DevOps kool-aid a lot of the other speakers were serving, but it also sounds like common sense — are most IT organizations really that poorly run that developers are totally unaware their software is sending messages that are generating network storms, or network engineers are clueless enough about QoS to route leased lines into their data center through their public-facing Internet?"