Fudge Sunday - Cloud in Public: DevCommsOps
This week we continue to take a look at public things for a public cloud.
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This issue is part 3 of a 5 part series
- Fudge Sunday - Cloud in Public: Status Dashboards
- Fudge Sunday - Cloud in Public: Engineering SLO
- Fudge Sunday - Cloud in Public: DevCommsOps
- Fudge Sunday - Cloud in Public: Mean Time To RCA
- Fudge Sunday - Cloud in Public: Impact Mapping
When I wrote about The Perfect Team, I summarized it as one to do it, write it down, and think ahead. We now have a historical perspective and definitions for the status dashboards and the Engineering SLO. Next, letâs talk about how âwrite it downâ can be expressed as various forms of communication in DevOps cultures.
DevCommsOps is best described as a purposeful insertion of change management communications within a DevOps culture and conspicuously expressing change management communications. To unpack that neologism a bit, imagine things we want (need?) to know relating to change that is planned, achieved, deferred, failed, and resulting in an outcome.
Recall that Error Budgets, Uptime, and SLO are simply a way to describe the operational objectives to stay up and running balanced with the innovation demands for developing new features, functionality, and availability for services. As such, DevCommsOps provides a consistent and conspicuous account for the changes planned, taking place, and completed that draw against Error Budgets.
Is DevCommsOps a word soup for Changelog, Release Notes, and Error Budget tracking? Perhaps! In practice, much like the growing depth of status dashboards, a single Changelog is more symbolic than practical as a single page to follow all change.
Is DevCommsOps a word soup for a post-ChatOps world within the context of Error Budgets economic policy? Perhaps! However, ChatOps definitions are likely going to vary from vendor to vendor to practitioner pioneers.
Luckily, thereâs always a cat meme ready to help us better understand.
Vive La ChatOps!
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Image rare dâune reproduction de la pyramide de Chatops https://t.co/KLEYyqyTkL
DevCommsOps in practice
- Who do cloud companies send âwrite it downâ? Public? Personalized?
- What do cloud companies âwrite it downâ?
- Where do cloud companies âwrite it downâ?
- When do cloud companies âwrite it downâ?
- Why do cloud companies âwrite it downâ?
Letâs take 1-3 in this issue and leave 4-5 for our following issues in the series.
To provide examples, letâs examine where DevCommsOps is found within the hyperscale cloud service providers today using a basic search for âRelease Notes,â âChangelog,â âNotices / Maintenance / Announcements,â and âRoot Cause Analyses (RCAs) / Incidents.â The list is in no particular order or weighting other than shorter names to longer names.
IBM Cloud
- ârelease notesâ = 224 hits
- âchangelogâ = 81 hits
- âmaintenanceâ = 9 hits
- âannouncementâ = 25 hits (round robin) since July 23, 2021
- âincidentsâ = 9 hits (as PDFs)
Alibaba Cloud
- ârelease notesâ = 51 hits
- âchangelogâ = 9 hits
- ânoticesâ = 420 hits
Microsoft Azure
- ârelease notesâ = 726 hits
- âchangelogâ = 46
- âRCAsâ = 7 pages going back to November 20, 2019
Amazon Web Services
- ârelease notesâ = ??? (100s? 1000s?)
- âchangelogâ = ??? (100s? 1000s?)
- âpost event summariesâ = 14 RCAs for major service events
Google Cloud Platform
- ârelease notesâ = ??? (100s? 1000s?)
- âchangelogâ = ??? (100s? 1000s?)
- âincidentsâ = 140 over a 12 months period (round robin)
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
- ârelease notesâ = 1118
- âchangelogâ = 6
- âincidentsâ = 34 over a 3 month period paginated
Notes:
- As of this brief exercise, the only hyperscale cloud service provider that appears to have a âsingle pageâ approach to Release Notes and Changelog is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
- Compared to AWSâs use of the term major, Google Cloud Platform âincidents,â Oracle Cloud Infrastructure âincidents,â and Microsoft Azure RCAs are more granular and historically accessible IMHO.
- OCI Status appears to be using Atlassian Statuspage.
- IBM Cloud publishes incident reports as PDFs.
While there are variations amongst the hyperscalers in expressing DevCommsOps, it is essential to consider personalization less transparent to public perspectives. Personalization is outside of the examples above because these are not public representations.
At the same time, personalized views are unique to the customer experience, which is a topic for our next issue related to time to published communications and dependency mapping.
At this point, we have established definitions for status dashboards and the Engineering SLO set against the backdrop of communications of DevOps culture in the form of DevCommsOps. Now we have a baseline to look at for comparison against timing and dependencies.
In the remaining two issues of the series, we will examine the time involved in publishing âRoot Cause Analyses (RCAs) / Incidentsâ and dependency mapping value. We will also look at the increasing importance of dependency mapping for the future. The answers to âWhen and Whyâ from questions 4-5 above are coming soon.
Stay tuned!
Disclosure
I am linking to my disclosure.