You know I never actually intended to write a book. That sounds strange doesn’t it? It’s not like I tripped one day, fell on my keyboard and NEXT GEN DEVOPS: Creating The DevOps Organisation appeared on the screen.

When I was trying to bring DevOps to EA I read a bunch of people’s DevOps manifestos. I read a lot of blog articles about tools and technologies. I read about how Development and Operations could collaborate, I read about full-stack developers and of course I read about Netflix and Etsy’s successes. I spent days researching DevOps and in all that time and in all those articles I didn’t find a structured approach I could hand to my boss that would help her understand what she might be getting into and what advantages it might bring to our organisation and the business as a whole. I didn’t find a framework of strategies that could be moulded into EA’s existing structure that would bring immediate benefits. I didn’t find a step-by-step approach to moving to DevOps.

When I left EA it was my intention to create such a framework. When I started work on it though I found myself writing pages and pages of exposition. Every time I presented a concept in the structure of a framework I felt I needed to justify each idea. After all my approach has evolved as the industry and my career has evolved these past twenty years. It’s difficult to sum it up in a couple of pages. After just a couple of weeks of this I decided that I should write the book then the framework.

Now when I publish the framework the book serves as the exposition. If someone wants to understand where an idea came from I can refer them to the book. If someone wants examples, they’re in the book and more can be easily published, supported by the book.

The book has been available for six months now. In that time I’ve sold something like 140 copies. I’ve presented themes from the book to a variety of different audiences, fielded questions, received feedback and reviews and It’s now time to start work on the framework.

The framework will be open source and free. By that I mean I intend to publish it for free and make it available in an online source control system so that others can contribute to it. I don’t yet know what kind of structure I’ll need to put in place to manage contributions (or even if anyone besides me will want to contribute to it).

To get people started I intend to begin the project formally by publishing the structure of the framework. My main inspiration for the structure will be ITIL (specifically the old service management and service delivery I books I studied). I’d then like to start working with a wider group of people on the details. If you’d like to contribute or offer help then please drop me a line: grant@nextgendevops.com