What devops means for the
sysadmin ?
Sharing customer experiences in Europe
Damien Caro
Technical Evangelist Manager
Microsoft
dcaro@microsoft.com
@dcaro

Agenda
Customer
identities
People Processes Tools &
Technologies

Customer's identities
Customer A
Large European car manufacturer
Software development outsourced
Code production outsourced
Backend for connected cars
(Internet of Things)
Linux Suse 9.11
Microsoft Azure & Vmware
Customer B
Internet media
Software development in-house
Code production in-house
Client and back-end for media
streaming
Windows Server 2008 / 2008 R2
Microsoft Azure & Rackspace

People - Observations

People - Recommendations
• Operations people should have developing experience (scripting or
equivalent) or at least willing to learn
• Sell the approach and the why
• Get to a culture of "Learning on the job"
• Internal workshop on technologies can help
• Sharing knowledge and experience

Processes – Observations
No Ops

Processes - Recommendations
• Business alignment between teams is the key
• Careful to not dilute the knowledge across siloed teams
• Integration Ops in Dev teams is not always a good idea
• Think on the impact on the outsourcing model
• Support and enable fluid communications

Learning curve
• Teams will walk the curve
• In some companies 20% of
sysadmins are expected to fall off
• Start with a delimited system to
gain easy results.
• Take common subject to get the
better help
• Do not underestimate the
resistance to change
Company A Company B

Tools & Technologies
OS Configuration
• Switch to a descriptive approach,
rethink existing scripts
• Learn the languages: JSON, Ruby,
Powershell & DSC
• Collect existing procedures and convert
them in definitions
Cloud Configuration
• Click & configure is a dangerous start
• Get in the project from the very
beginning
• Learn the capacity of the cloud
platform
Application Configuration
• Leverage community work
• DSC modules / Chef supermarket
• Create modules or recipes for your
application
Knowledge
• Gain a good understanding of the
platforms
• Implement a "Hackaton" style
workshop with dev and ops

Final thoughts
• People have to buy in the approach, identify the points of resistance
• In large organization, DevOps is valued at the higher levels but takes time
to cascade
• Share a common business objective between Devs & Ops
• Learn the tools in a workshop with the full team

Thank you !
Damien Caro
Technical Evangelist Manager
Microsoft
dcaro@microsoft.com
@dcaro

Working title: What DevOps means for the sysadmin?
Abstract: DevOps is indeed a really good way of operating today’s applications but what does it really means for the
sysadmin? What needs to be learned, what needs to change in the way we manage systems and communicate,
where is the starting point?
Based on the learnings from a project with a large European customer we will discuss the best practices learned and
the issues encountered. We will also talk about the tools and languages used and the learning curves depending on
which platforms is used.
We will illustrate our sessions with examples using the industry standard like Chef, Puppet or PowerShell targeting
the different platforms like Windows and Linux.