The Art of Cooking – Grandma’s DevOps practices – or how to compete with her in your environment

The original story:

Your grandmother did cooking from scratch – she had all the time to do so. She controlled everything

• she knew the recipe’s by heart as well as their variants (versions);
• she made the right choice: Selecting the best ingredients;
• she managed several processing steps in parallel;
• she was knowing all the tools, over to the perfect timing and oven settings

In brief: Everything was under her control, but took time!

Would you aspire to cook like good old grandma today to impress your guests? Asked in other words: Are you sure, you’d manage to do so? Be true to yourself! Prediction: The shear idea would make you break out in sweat. And here is why:

How on earth to get started?

All you see in front of you is this mountain of boring, exhausting, repetitive and error-prone tasks. You search for recipes’, but non seems to be straightforward. Finally you decide to combine two recipe’s which look promising. You hurry around to get all ingredients, from different places of course and not all at quality and price that suit you. Now, yet exhausted from the basic organization of your task, you want to get started in your kitchen: Somebody left it in a messy state, so first of all you have to clean the environment and all the tools you need. You even find some tools broken, so at best you can borrow some or need to quickly buy one or as a last resort: Carry on without it and improvise!

Development / Build:

Slicing, dicing and finally – an accident – you cut into your finger. Eventually you get started with the build: You roll out the pizza yeast dough The next accident: You cannot use the oven as it’s suddenly out of operation mode! By the time you try to find someone who can fix the oven, your yeast dough has become fermented. So you have two choices: Start over again with the fundamentals: The dough - or make a test:

Test:

Something smells, doesn’t taste well, but hey you need to carry on, guests are coming soon!

Deploy:

Desperately do you try to get the right table wear to adapt your cooking result. You did not think about where you will present your results and how to arrange them.

Feedback loop:

The final reward: User Acceptance Test failed! – User escaped from the dinner table, claiming that everything would be inedible. There was zero motivation to explain why – but what is assured is: Your guests will never again try your creations at your table!

Recommendation from an honest friend:

Are you ready to learn now how joyful cooking can be, if you did it in a much different way with the right mindset and tools? Come to the Ignite Talk on The Art of DevOps Cooking – Grandma’s DevOps practices – or how to compete with her in your environment

What’s in it for you:

Back from DevOps Days, you can proudly tell grandma that you learned how to stay on top of things in your environment - the same way she does in her kitchen!

About Sandy Flath: I recently joined CA Technologies, with a background in international business and some programming Know How. The company I work for aims to bring DevOps into the C-Suite. Thereby, pursuing to make companies aware of good practices to leverage the full potential of DevOps. I’m a community exchange point at CA Technologies, making sure that CA Technologies stays on top of the issues practitioner’s face: Where the struggle is and where success happens – and most importantly: How and why.