In order to successfully automate something, the pieces being automated have to be ‘predictable’. I use ‘predictable’ here – rather than ‘consistent’ – deliberately. A ‘predictable’ environment means you can anticipate its state and configuration. ‘Consistent’ gets misconstrued as ‘unchanging’, which is the opposite of what Agile software delivery is trying to achieve.
Consider deploying a fresh build of an application into a test environment. If you cannot predict what the build being deployed looks like and how the environment will be set up, why would you expect to reliably be able to get that build working in that environment in a predictable window of time? And yet, that is exactly what so many teams do.
The proposed solution is usually to automate the deployment. That, however, leads to its own problems if you do not address the predictability of the underlying stuff being automated. I talk to teams with stories about how they abandoned automation because it ‘slowed things down’ or ‘just did not work’. That leads teams to say, and in some cases believe, that their applications are ‘too complex to deploy automatically’.
At the heart of achieving predictability of the code packages and environments is the fact that they are different teams. Somehow it is harder to collaborate with the developers or operations team than it is to spend months attempting to build a mountain of hard to maintain deployment code. A mountain of code that stands a good chance of being abandoned, by the way. That represents months of wasted time, effort, and life because people working on the same application do not collaborate or cooperate.
And we get another example of why so many DevOps conversations become about culture rather than technology… Which really sucks, because that example is at the expense of a fair bit of pain from the real people on those teams.
The lesson here is that there is no skipping the hard work of establishing predictability in the packaging of the code and environments before charging into automating deployments. We are in an era now where really good packaging and configuration management tools are very mature.
And the next generation of tools that unifies the code and environment changes into immutable, deployable, and promotable artifacts is coming fast. But even with the all of these awesome tools, cross-disciplinary experts will have to come together to contribute to the creation of predictable versions of those artifacts.
The ‘C’ in CAMS stands for “Collaboration”. There are no shortcuts.
This article is also on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/predictability-predictably-hard-dan-zentgraf/
