Last week I was at DevOpsDays Portland. As expected, the open space topics were really interesting. Two in particular stood out for me. The first was about fitting DevOps into your organization. DevOps teams seemed to be the way people were going. If you have been to other events with prominent figures of the DevOps community present, you may have noticed how the mention of “DevOps teams” can spur heated debates.
I believe organizations are opting for DevOps teams because it side steps the cultural aspect of DevOps. I’m torn on this because this could lead to one more silo that will make matters worse. However, there is a valid case for DevOps teams, as discussed by Jez Humble. I got the sense that there will be silos built that hopefully will be torn down and the culture of DevOps fully embraced.
The other open space session that got my attention was about DevOps in the enterprise. There was a lot of discussion around tools. Participants realized that process and being able to model processes in tools are important. I don’t go to DevOpsDays events to pitch Serena products, but I was asked to describe what Serena does for managing DevOps processes. At Serena, we take a process-centric approach to release management. We understand that processes in the enterprise are complex, need to integrate into many different systems and need to provide robust auditing and reporting capabilities. The fact that Serena has been helping model processes for many years in some of the most complex environments with heavy regulatory requirements seemed to resonate. Add to that Serena’s investment in release management and DevOps and I believe we have an exceptionally compelling solution.
Serena has a monthly DevOps Drive-In webcast series. This month on November 21 at 8am PT we have Richard Michaels from Eaton Vance discussing release management at Eaton Vance and how Serena’s solutions helped tame their release management process. You can register for the webcast here.
