It’s funny.  When we recently started working on an upgrade of our Intranet social media platform, and we were trying to figure out how to meld the infrastructure-change-heavy operation with the need for devs, designers, and testers to be able to start working on the system before “three months from now,” we broached the idea of “maybe we should do that in iterations!”  First, get the new wiki up and working.  Then, worry about tuning, switching the back end database, etc.  Very basic, but it got me thinking about the problem in terms of “hey, Infrastructure still operates in terms of waterfall, don’t we.”

Then when Peco and I moved over to NI R&D and started working on cloud-based systems, we quickly realized the need for our infrastructure to be completely programmable – that is, not manually tweaked and controlled, but run in a completely automated fashion.  Also, since we were two systems guys embedded in a large development org that’s using agile, we were heavily pressured to work in iterations along with them.  This was initially a shock – my default project plan has, in traditional fashion, months worth of evaluating, installing, and configuring various technology components before anything’s up and running.   But as we began to execute in that way, I started to see that no, really, agile is possible for infrastructure work – at least “mostly.”  Technologies like cloud computing help, but there’s still a little more up front work required than with programming – but you can get mostly towards an agile methodology (and mindset!).

Then at OpsCamp last month, we discovered that there’s been this whole Agile Operations/Automated Infrastructure/devops movement thing already in progress we hadn’t heard about.  I don’t keep in touch with The Blogosphere ™ enough I guess.  Anyway, turns out a bunch of other folks have suddenly come to the exact same conclusion and there’s exciting work going on re: how to make operations agile, automate infrastructure, and meld development and ops work.

So if  you also hadn’t been up on this, here’s a roundup of some good related core thoughts on these topics for your reading pleasure!