IT Operations is a discipline inside information technology. Picture the normal 2-dimensional grid of issues surrounding a product and then expand to a 3-dimensional view when you factor in how each product has its own grid of issues and one problem in one area can impact another product in a completely unforeseen way.
Before I came to The Company I Work For, I had a boss who hammered into the team I was on the importance of knowing what boxes held what applications, where they were connected to and what depended on them. In a 400-server data center with shaky power delivery, this wasn’t an academic exercise. After the second or third data center loss through local power problems, we developed a process that had that kind of 360-view of all systems so that we knew what had to be turned on first, second, third and so on.
At The Company I Work For – our application development environment is physically small but houses several dozen applications pertaining to our job. Our PHP/Apache environment shares space on the same server as our code repository and our SQL schema repository. Upgrading the Bugzilla app can have people coming over to us going “Where’s the Wiki?”
It pays to be aware.
Our mandate is to have an environment that requires no more than 25% of a single headcount – we’re always encouraged to find any way to make our job more efficient, happen faster and require less admin overhead. If we can keep the cost down, so much the better. I haven't found a way to put all systems within a Matrix to show their relation to other systems - a configuration management tool, perhaps? If I find one, I'll publish it here.
No comments:
Post a Comment