[Ed. note: Cloud Advisory Group (CAG) update #3.]
The term “DevOps” has been around for at least ten years and has been defined in many ways. The most common definitions describe DevOps as the practice of development and operations engineers working closely together to provide high-quality, rapid IT service delivery. While this may seem like a straight-forward organizational state to reach for, there are cultural and technological obstacles to achieving a mature DevOps practice.
From the start of the Cloud Infrastructure Migration Planning (CIMP) Project, the project sponsors recognized the migration to AWS as an opportunity to advance the organization’s DevOps capacities because AWS removes many of the technical obstacles. In particular, AWS provides customers with a built-in mechanism for programmatically managing the infrastructure running in their environment. And while there are elements of Emory’s on-premises infrastructure that offer similar accessibility, they are nowhere near as integrated or as complete as what AWS offers.
To help show what is possible with AWS and more advanced DevOps practices, the CIMP project team organized a two-part DevOps workshop led by Dan Gilmer, an enterprise DevOps architect from Smartronix. The workshop’s first session was held on Tuesday, January 15, and more than fifteen people from eleven different teams participated.
After the first session, the workshop participants were broken up into teams and given homework assignments consisting of use cases (most of existing practices that are very manual) and asked to rethink how these could be improved with DevOps practices. The homework assignments are due before the final session, which is scheduled for Thursday, February 7.
Obviously, there will be a lot of work left to do after the workshop ends next month, but if the first session is representative of our team’s desire to collaborate and automate more, then there will be many good things to come.
Information about the DevOps workshop can be found here, including the presentation slides and meeting recordings: https://wiki.service.emory.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=113320968 (scroll to the bottom, or hit Workshops link in the table of contents).
Contact Us
If you have questions or want to get more involved with the migration work, please contact us at:
You may also reach out directly to any of the CAG members: Alex Berry, Ramya Bommareddy, Joel Burke, Steve Collins, Zach Cox, Eddie Feliciano, Mark Kawasaki, or Paul Petersen.
Please let us know if you have feedback on the content or format of our update.
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