{"id":4440,"date":"2017-05-11T13:50:14","date_gmt":"2017-05-11T12:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ee.yelkdev.site\/?p=4440"},"modified":"2025-03-13T02:26:09","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T02:26:09","slug":"value-operability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.equalexperts.com\/blog\/our-thinking\/value-operability\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond DevOps: The value of Operability"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my last post in our \u201cBeyond DevOps\u201d series, I explained<\/a> why DevOps has become a constraint on our ability to deliver software to our clients.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019d like to cover why we believe operability to be the most valuable part of DevOps.<\/p>\n

What is operability, anyway?<\/h3>\n

At Equal Experts, we share a set of Technical Values<\/a>. One of them is \u201cwe value software developed with a focus on operation and maintenance in production\u201d, and it\u2019s worth considering it in full:<\/p>\n

\u201cSoftware delivers little to no value unless it is deployed and running in production, with real users using it. We therefore need to understand how the production environments work, what monitoring is in place and how our software is deployed to production. By understanding the existing processes for monitoring and maintaining software in production, we can ensure that we deliver value to our customers and avoid problems at what is traditionally the most stressful time of a project\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

To me, this is all about operability.<\/p>\n

Operability is defined in Wikipedia as \u201cthe ability to keep a system in a safe and reliable functioning condition, according to predefined operational requirements\u201d<\/a>. I describe it to our clients as \u201cthe operational requirements we deliver to ensure our software runs in production as desired\u201d.<\/p>\n

Operability has been around since Jesse Robbins wrote Operations is a Competitive Advantage<\/a> in 2007, but the biggest influence on my thinking has been Andrew Shafer\u2019s talk \u201cWhat even is Operable?\u201d at Operability 2015:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=6f-AEYJXQkQ<\/p>\n

Andrew spoke about the need to accept that working at scale means always working in a state of partial failure, and having an architecture that\u2019s self-aware of its own health is key to easing your operational burden. I couldn\u2019t agree more with this view.<\/p>\n

When I speak with our clients, I explain that operability is about more than just the infrastructure automation they\u2019ve been led to expect from \u201cDevOps Engineers\u201d. Operability is about a number of different techniques that help us to run software in production, in both normal and abnormal conditions:<\/p>\n