ChatOps - Jesse Newland's talk @ puppetconf

Everyone is pairing, all of the time - Jesse Newland

In this video from Jesse Newland (GitHub ops guy) he introduces the subject of ChatOps as way of improving the communication flow in ops.

I didn't go to Puppet Conf, by the looks of this video I should have because this exactly chimes with my experience over the last few years.

This is an Ops focussed talk but companies like Etsy are finding that centralizing Chat brings the whole company together. I think this is just an extension of Jesse's line: everyone is pairing, all of the time.

Join the LinkedIn ChatOps Group

ChatOps vs DevOps

I think we're done with "DevOps". All I see is organizations renaming their Ops teams, or optimistic sysadmins, renaming themselves as DevOps. A DevOps team is NOT the point, never has been and never will be. But it does seem like the argument has been lost.

So what next to try to get people to focus on actually changing the culture, instead of just changing a name?

Well, ChatOps is a concrete thing. You can tick the boxes:

• install a chat server
• get everyone using a chat client
• connect nagios and other alerting to it
• add interactive robots

There's a clear progression and you can measure your progress easily:

• is everyone using chat?
• are the developers and the sysadmins chatting together?
• are they chatting about work?
• are people plugging in information?
  • new commits?
  • new builds?
  • servers down?
• are people using interactive robots?
• are people writing interactive robots?
• have the roles between dev and ops blurred yet?

So I think having a concrete thing like ChatOps is a good thing for fighting the ambiguity of DevOps.