Mentions

Tim O'Reilly on Why We Started the Velocity Conference

Tim O'Reilly's 2013 retrospective on how the Velocity Conference began. I co-founded it with Steve Souders and chaired the program.

Jesse Robbins on the Rise of DevOps (InfoQ Interview)

InfoQ interviewed me on how DevOps started, why infrastructure as code changed operations, and what it actually takes to get developers and ops working together.

Q&A: Ex-Amazon 'Master of Disaster' Jesse Robbins on the Power of 'Relentless Optimism' in Startups

GeekWire ran a long Q&A while I was running Opscode and pulled out the operating principle I kept using inside Amazon: when people say no, find a way to make them say yes.

“When you're trying to change the way big organizations work, a lot of people say no a lot. Rather than try to fight them, you've got to find a way to make them say yes. Being a force for awesome in the world is finding ways to say yes.”

Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure

Jesse Robbins (Amazon), Kripa Krishnan (Google), and John Allspaw (Etsy) discuss how they built organizations that deliberately trigger failure to get stronger: powering off data centers, running 96-hour disaster simulations, and transforming blame cultures into learning cultures.

“You can't choose whether or not you're going to have failures — they are going to happen no matter what — but you can choose in many cases when you're going to learn the lessons.”

Jesse Robbins on DevOps as Business Alignment

Jez Humble interviewed me at Thoughtworks on DevOps as business alignment: developers, operations, and the company shipping faster without giving up reliability.

“The role of operations is the role of enabling as much awesome as you can.”

Changing Culture & Being a Force for Awesome

My 2012 Velocity talk on changing engineering culture from the inside. Start small, build champions, use metrics to create confidence, exploit compelling events.

“Don't fight stupid. Focus on where you can make more awesome.”

Jesse Robbins on the State of Infrastructure Automation

O'Reilly Radar interviewed me on Chef's evolution from open-source project to enterprise infrastructure automation, and where cloud operations was headed next.

5 Pivotal Documents in the Evolution of the DevOps Movement

Klint Finley's 2012 canon of DevOps. The Agile Manifesto, Tim O'Reilly's Operations piece, my 'Operations is a Competitive Advantage' post from 2007, John Allspaw's 10 Deploys talk, and Jay Lyman's analyst report.

“Operations is a Competitive Advantage (Secret Sauce for Startups!)”