Culture eats PaaS and DevOps for Breakfast. Convergence : a Hangout

Amidst all the hype around PaaS and DevOps right now is an essential truth – that just as its people that usually break things, so it is that it is people that usually fix them. Automation has its limits. Indeed, to my mind one of the best things about the DevOps movement itself is that its about using tools to augment highly skilled operators, rather than to replace them.

So during this Google Hangout, part of the ongoing Purechat series I moderate on behalf of IBM, it was great to see all the panellists come back to the same issues. Break down the silos in order to do great work. Get ops and dev in the same room. The video runs a little long, but IBM helpfully broke it into nibbles here.

So while some might say DevOps means Ansible, Chef, Puppet or SaltStack, that’s overly reductive.

Same goes for Paas – “oh yeah mean Heroku or CloudFoundry”. Apparently not. It’s fun watching me and the other panellists dance around this.

Sanjeev Sharma (@sd_architect), IBM, Worldwide Technical Sales Lead, DevOps
Brian Massey (@brym13), IBM, Senior Product Manager, PureSystems
Mark Willemse, ING, Executive IT Teamleader Customer Intelligence
Peter Philp (@Philp_Prolifics), Prolifics, Solution Director

I am really pleased how the show came out, particularly the insights from Mark Willemse at ING – consultants and product folks have useful opinions, but the voice of the customer is always very welcome. Also to note that ING is coming at PaaS from an intriguing perspective- really its just about better developer experience and better quality.

Which is a lot like this definition of DevOps last year from Jay Snyder, director of platform engineering at Aetna.

“It’s a way to make the developer experience better. How can we help developers to build better apps? it’s about putting more power in the hands of the developer via automation.

We built something we call Developer Cloud. We virtualised the client… and put in the cloud. Then we took the runtime and put it there too – so we got consistency of development across QA/dev/test and production.”

So what one customer calls DevOps another calls PaaS. But that’s OK – both definitions amount to the same thing. Better serving developers to get better results.

Enjoy the Hangout.