2 weeks ago, Brian Gracely (@bgracely) shared some information with me talking about the changing landscape of DevOps and it hit spot on. Brian showed a picture of a book titled The New Kingmakers, How Developers Conquered The World. I had never heard of it before so I wanted to explore, and to not spoil it completely, it did not disappoint. The book is pretty short at 57 total pages and has a whopping cost of only $3 on Amazon. There's no reason why anyone can't read this book because I was able to finish it on a 3 hour flight (and I'm a slow reader).
I spoke at the Nashville VMUG this year about how SDDC and Orchestration is really the new way forward for all us infrastructure geeks. Fact of the matter is that infrastructure is becoming very simplified. Needing super smart geeks that know how build vSphere clusters, zone FC storage, and configure networks are only going to be a subset of skills required (I've got my own thoughts on the death of the VCDX). I've taken a few steps forward myself and created two ruby on rails projects so I could get myself back into the swing of development. If you don't believe me, then why do you see so many infrastructure people talking about SDN, python, and Pivotal on twitter? There will always be infrastructure requirements, but this is where DevOps is starting to break the limits and development is needed to make the infrastructure work for YOU. Whether its automation, customization, or integration, the infrastructure needs to fit your organization's goals.
Back to the book, I would recommend this book to CIO's, IT Directors, IT Managers, or anyone looking for a reason to start coding. It gives a run down of the evolution of languages from the early days of C and FORTRAN to the sexy new languages of python and ruby. It also looks at how companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon AWS have been able to take over the world as dominant household names. The book also talks how these companies court their developers and how acqui-hiring and open-source became a new norm for acquisitions. For the C-level and IT Managers, it will give you a much needed reality check if you don't take your development teams seriously.
The graphic below really stood out to me in the book because it's something I've experienced myself in just the past few months. This graphic sets the stage on how DevOps are more in-tune with what end-users actually need. And if you are trying to persuade the developers to do something on your own agenda, think differently. The example in the book talks about how instant messaging in the 90's took over internal communications without the IT Leadership ever having any knowledge.
I don't want to give anything else away, but I hope a few of you take a few hours out to purchase and read the book (considering it's a text book that is still up to date). Enjoy.