"The Visible Ops Handbook" Review
My boss was kind enough to lend me his copy of The Visible Ops Handbook to read over Spring Break. I'd seen the book recommended many times, so when I saw the distinctive cover on his desk I had to ask about it. My initial reaction was that it was much thinner than I ever thought it would be, I was used to big compsci books and this is certainly not like those. However, short as it may be, there's definitely a lot of really great information packed in there. The book is only about 80 pages, so I was able to finish it on the flight to Indiana for Spring Break. The handbook contains a series of four steps detailing how you can transform your organization into a higher performing one. The four steps are:
- Stabalize the Patient (Modify First Response)
- Catch and Release (Find Fragile Artifacts)
- Establish Repeatable Build Library
- Enable Continuous Improvement
Stabalize the Patient
This step mainly concerns with stabalizing the organization's infrastructure ("the patient"). The biggest point they hit upon is that 80% of outages are caused by the organization themselves. To rememdy this, they focus on change management and control. Tripwire (software which detects changes to specified files) was heavily mentioned here, though that is because one of the authors (Gene Kim) founded Tripwire. They of course mention that alternatives exist, but none are discussed as in-depth (relatively speaking, as in, named) as Tripwire.
Catch and Release
This step is a response to a fragile infrastructure, that is, infrastructure that has been created and configured by hand, meaning it is not able to repeatably created and destroyed identically. An inventory must be done of all assets, configurations, and services to find the those which have the lowest successful change rate, the highest MTTR, and the highest downtime costs. Once these assets have been enumerated, the authors suggest that they be "frozen", meaning no changes are applied to them without good reason. Now that the infrastructure has been inventoried, the organization can focus on creating a provsioning process such that they have identical, repeatable infrastructure that can be easily replicated, which nicely leads into the next step.
Establish Repeatable Build Library
This step focuses on implementing an effective release management process by creating repeatable builds for the most important assets, with the end goal being to make it cheaper to rebuild than repair a given server (or, as my boss likes to put it, treating infrastructure like cattle, when one gets sick, just take it out back and shoot it and bring the next one in).
Enable Continuous Improvement
The previous steps have focused on building a tight loop of "Release=>Control=>Resolution". This step focuses on implementing metrics surrounding those process areas, because, as H. James Harrington said:
Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can't measure something, you can't understand it. If you can't understand it, you can't control it. If you can't control it, you can't improve it.
Conclusion
I found the handbook to be a fast, concise read. I believe that any Operations Engineer/ System Administrator/etc should read it as it contains many valuable insights into increasing your organizations performance. Highly recommended.