Happy Thanksgiving! This week, Aja and Brian are talking DevOps with Nathen Harvey and Jez Humble. Our guests thoroughly explain what DevOps is and why it’s important. DevOps purposely has no official definition but can be thought of as a community of practice that aims to make large-scale systems reliable and secure. It’s also a way to get developers and operations to work together to focus on the needs of the customer.

Nathen later tells us all about DevOpsDays, a series of locally organized conferences occurring in cities around the world. The main goal is to bring a cross-functional group of people together to talk about how they can improve IT, DevOps, business strategy, and consider cultural changes the organization might benefit from. DevOpsDays supports this by only planning content for half the conference, then turning over the other half to attendees via Open Spaces. At this time, conference-goers are welcome to propose a topic and start a conversation.

Jez then describes the Accelerate State of DevOps Report, how it came to be, and why it’s so useful. It includes items like building security into the software, testing continuously, ideal management practices, product development practices, and more. With the help of the DevOps Quick Check, you can discover the places your company could use some help and then refer back to the report for suggestions of improvements in those areas.

Nathen Harvey

Nathen Harvey helps the community understand and apply DevOps and SRE practices in the cloud. He is part of the global organizing committee for the DevOpsDays conferences and was a technical reviewer for the 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report.

Jez Humble

Jez Humble is co-author of several books on software including Shingo Publication Award winner “Accelerate” and Jolt Award winner “Continuous Delivery”. He has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents. He works for Google Cloud as a technology advocate and teaches at UC Berkeley.

Cool things of the week

• It’s a wrap: Key announcements from Next ‘19 UK blog
• Explainable AI site
• Hand-drawn Graphviz diagrams blog
  • Add one line to plot in XKCD comic sketchy style site

Interview

• DevOps insights from Google site
• DevOps Quick Check site
• DevOpsDays site
• Agile Alliance site
• Velocity Conference site
• DevOps Enterprise Summit site

Question of the week

Why do you need the Cloud SQL Proxy?

Where can you find us next?

DevOpsDays has events coming up across the globe, including Galway, Warsaw, Berlin, and Tel Aviv. Nathen and Jez will be at Delivery Conf.

Aja will be home drinking tea!

Brian will also be home drinking tea!