Excerpts From “What Can DevOps Learn from Formula 1” Presentation

Full presentation available here.

A list of salient points follows:

1. How to define success?
• Developers want Agility & Change
• Operations want Availability & Stability
2. F1 car lifecycle
• Design –> Develop –> Test –> Deploy –> Support
• Support (Operations) need to always provide feedback to Design (Development)
• Engineers need to work hand-in-hand with Operations
3. Success must be measured
• F1: Telemetry and monitoring are required to deliver drivers’ results
• IT Systems: Performance data collection and analysis as well as performance monitoring are required to deliver success
• Monitoring is critical in managing change
4. Need to constantly monitor and manage impact of change. Need to provide feedback for where the car:
• Is fast – where things are done right
• Is slow – where to optimise and improve
• Failed – where to fix
5. Three key aspects that impact application performance
• Concurrency
• Data volume
• Resources
6. Where does one find the real bottlenecks?
1. Not often in Development – no issues in concurrency, data volume, resource
2. Less often in QA/ Test – concurrency issues may likely surface, resource issues may occasionally surface
3. Often in Production – concurrency, data volume and resource issues become evident