On the shoulders of giants

“Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others” – Sam Harris

When we talk about DevOps we often talk about it terms of temporal actions. We talk about culture as an observer or actor, we talk about Automation as a series of tasks, we talk about Measurement as things that we can quantify and we talk about sharing as connecting ideas and expressing them for others to know. Interestingly on top of this we still question or debate or convey what DevOps is or isn’t. (just watch #DevOps on twitter for the ceaseless battle)

To me, DevOps is everything above and much more. It’s an expression of not only empathy for fellow human beings, but an expression of love and passion for one another, not a personal love but a connection to other human beings that transcends in a way that connects us above and beyond what mere words can convey.

We often joke about “Thought Leaders” or express our fear of “Imposter Syndrome” or copy and mimic the perceived behaviors of the “Unicorns” but I find this merely an exercise in humility more than anything else.  All uniformly falling into the not seeing one’s self (or not fully crediting one’s self) as being part of this conscious activity we call DevOps.

This is a “big tent” party, there is no admittance card, just an open mind willing to learn, share and in essence respect one each other as one would love each other – not in a transactional “I love you because..” but in a way that connects the human spirit. It’s okay, not just okay, but perfectly reasonable and human to have your own perspective of what DevOps is and I hope more people feel empowered to share their experiences and their story.

It is this essence I think we need to take our discussion to – for the problems it solves aren’t limited to what we call the “DevOps movement”, it could help in anywhere from education, politics, home, work – you name it – anywhere humans are involved, we can take these lessons learned and apply them (and we should!)

I’ve been pondering how to write something on this for ages..  the last thing I want to do is come off all “hippy dippy” but at the same time, I don’t want to not share my thoughts on this – it’s hard finding a balance until I realized that the balance didn’t really matter. I feel the love, I feel the passion, I feel the energy – I should express this maybe as to remove the cloud of “hippy dippyness” and get down to what really matters. I’m not a psychologist, a scientist or even a philosopher but I am a human being so my opinion / views are merely expressed to share and have a conversation and connect with my readers. You bet I feel a sense of imposter syndrome and at the same time a desire (or internal mission/fire) for ”thought leadering”, but that isn’t what this is about.

The truth is, you really matter. Every single one of you. At first I got into this DevOps game because I felt how it helped, not just where I worked, but how it helped me. Years later, I stick to it and have realized how the lessons/concepts learned aren’t “Development” or “Operations” or even technology related, but universal to the human experience. I’ve shared some of my stories of “applied devops” and “how I’ve applied” it and now I’m sharing how I’ve internalized it and what it means to me – and I believe that is the true value of it therein.

Those of us wanting to share this experience often feel what we call “imposter syndrome” not because we’re faking it until we’re making it – but because we didn’t just invent this up even though we seem like “thought leader” on the subject matter, we’re just connecting/resonating with the philosophical and human experience of DevOps.
It’s this “a-ha” that fired me up to write again.. I feel I should not only explain what my message is in a way but open up to making this a series of how people can connect and relate not just to the experience of DevOps, but as human beings.

What I love about this community is the people. I love it that all the familiar names we know day in and day take time out of their busy lives to connect with us all, to speak to you in the hallway, to connect you to others and share experiences, their lives, their love and their passion. Not as celebrities taking time out of their celebrity lives to appease the plebes but as humans that have a general interest in making the world a better place to be.  The world is so small that even my personal and family experiences connect me with others, I’m warmed at the heart that John Willis and I crossed paths in many more ways than one and it’s those paths that we crossed in our unique ways that gave us a shared experience to know and love – and best of all John is just one of the many figures in this concept that go over and beyond to help make the world a better place.

John’s piece on burnout –  Karōjisatsu is heart wrenching, honest and passionate even if not written from the experiences of a professional psychologist or psychiatrist – but someone showing the humility to help those they love and respect and connect emotionally with other human beings who may be suffering from burnout. It’s hard to write and share such experiences in the light of imposter syndrome and it takes guts of steel to continue to share and talk about this at the many amazing conferences he speaks at and excellent (gut wrenching) stories shared on this subject.

We’re often not experts at all this knowledge, we’re merely connecting with it and expressing it through our own stories – Adding upon it.

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” – Isaac Newton

On the shoulders of these giants, we learn. We share. We measure. We experiment. We do what we have learned we can do to make our lives, our world, our jobs, our experiences better for us all. When Albert Einstein discovered his theory of Relativity, it was not invented out of thin air, it was a conscious study and internalization of the giants before him and a search for deeper understandings expressed through physics & mathematics. Einstein warrants his contributions to science, physics and the world, there is no doubt – but not as a guilty admittance of imposter syndrome or thought leadering, but as embracing the qualities of the human mind to understand itself and the universe.

We too can (and do) leverage mathematics as the language of measuring and quantifying (and we should get better at it). This is the temporal action of devops, the material result of plan, do, measure act and its super important and well covered in a plethora of other blogs so I’ll say its important, but not really the point. The point is you.

The concepts of DevOps is connecting humans to humans and recognition of our conscious ability to be aware, act on this awareness and respect how each one of us operates, grows and flourishes.  DevOps removes the obscurity of humans getting work done in the frame of “Development” and Operations” and it’s a stepping stone to a better understanding of the human condition so we can remove the influences of bad ideas, failed practices, crackpots and essential mysticisms and philosophies of everything  shaping our way of life and how we get work done.

The point isn’t to convey what we have learned and know as an authority of what should be done, but as a way for us to communicate and share what we know and can know. This is why we don’t say to copy each other and do what works for others – the culture, conscious and soul of a company isn’t universal and can only be understood through introspection and understanding the how and why and removing the barriers of connecting the work to be done through the experience of doing work with other human beings. (which could lend itself to some universality, but that would be a whole ‘nother story.. I don’t think homogenization is the answer 😉 )

We stand on the shoulder of giants recognizing the work of those before us, personalizing the work of today and having empathy for what will come tomorrow – not out of fear of change but the enlightenment of knowing we have the conscious ability to understand and have empathy.

DevOps in essence is the culmination of the human condition, our culture of free (competitive) markets, the popular sharing of ideas and an essence of equanimity as we struggle through our shared experiences and relate to one another. Knowing this helps our internal survival, our cultural survival and our career survival and that’s just the stepping stone of where this movement begins.

—-

As I sit here preparing to click “Publish Post” and I just want to go run and hide in my own conscious safety zone in my mind, but as I grow I learn that what I can share may help others and that sharing is what connects me as a human being and that is what I cherish. Its not the fear of speaking up I should concern myself with, its the fear I could have done something but didn’t that I don’t want.

NetworkManager CentOS 7.. Everything is fine

Anyone else getting tied up with NetworkManager on CentOS 7?

Example, building out a new machine with 2 interfaces, bonded and on a VLAN. When the machine boots up the network doesn’t start because you see:

RTNETLINK answers: File exists

Ouch..

if you run

service NetworkManager Status you then see something like

Oct 30 07:16:06 thisisfine.mydomain.com NetworkManager[2826]: <info> Failed to activate ‘Vlan bond0.10’: Connection ….ime

If you try and restart with “service network restart” it fails..

Since this is part of a bond, i checked out the interfaces attached – I first looked at my em3 adapter

[root@thisisfine network-scripts]# cat ifcfg-em3
BOOTPROTO=”none”
DEVICE=”em3″
HWADDR=”ec:f4:zz:e4:zz:b4″
ONBOOT=yes
PEERDNS=no
PEERROUTES=no
NM_CONTROLLED=no
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes

Then I checked out the other adapter in the bond – em4

[root@thisisfine network-scripts]# cat ifcfg-em4
BOOTPROTO=”none”
DEVICE=”em4″
HWADDR=”ec:f4:zz:e4:zz:b5″
ONBOOT=yes
PEERDNS=no
PEERROUTES=no
NM_CONTROLLED=no
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes

Looks good, nothing out of the ordinary. I even ran “ip link” and grepped for UP and em3/em4 were the adapters with link up.

2: em3: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,SLAVE,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq master bond0 state UP mode DEFAULT qlen 1000
4: em4: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,SLAVE,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq master bond0 state UP mode DEFAULT qlen 1000

Next I checked out the bond0 config..

[root@thisisfine network-scripts]# cat ifcfg-bond0
BOOTPROTO=”none”
DEVICE=”bond0″
ONBOOT=yes
PEERDNS=no
PEERROUTES=no
DEFROUTE=no
TYPE=Bond
BONDING_OPTS=”miimon=100 mode=active-backup”
BONDING_MASTER=yes
NM_CONTROLLED=no

looks good..

aww.. here we go.   my vlan on bond0..

[root@thisisfine network-scripts]# cat ifcfg-bond0.10
BOOTPROTO=”none”
IPADDR=”10.10.10.10″
NETMASK=”255.255.252.0″
GATEWAY=”10.10.10.1″
DEVICE=”bond0.10″
ONBOOT=yes
PEERDNS=no
PEERROUTES=no
VLAN=yes

Apparently my kickstart doesn’t add NM_CONTROLLED=no to the vlan on a bond.. off to fix.

[root@thisisfine network-scripts]# cat ifcfg-bond0.10

BOOTPROTO=”none”

IPADDR=”10.10.10.10″

NETMASK=”255.255.252.0″

GATEWAY=”10.10.10.1″

DEVICE=”bond0.10″

ONBOOT=yes

PEERDNS=no

PEERROUTES=no

VLAN=yes

NM_CONTROLLED=no

That worked..

However, it just seems that NetworkManager is the culprit.. if you simply do “service NetworkManager stop” and do “service network restart” everything is fine. (not really..)

Anyone else running into similar issues with NetworkManager? Are you simply disabling it entirely by turning it off? are you migrating to using it or are you managing what NetworkManager controls and using it for some things?

Sometimes I really miss the simplicity of just defining an interface and knowing it’s there.. I understand NetworkManager’s role on a desktop/workstation to manage wifi access and “automagically” manage your devices, but on Servers? What is your take? Are you disabling it if you don’t use DHCP? can it safely be disabled or should the tooling grow up around it and let it manage what it expects to manage?

Engineering the future backwards.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m probably butchering the crap out of what Cognitive Edge put into the “Future backwards” methodology but in butchering the crap out of it, I’ve learned it can be a great vehicle to visualize work but also bridge the communications gap and provide a way to represent emergence, failure, successes, convergence or simply clarify overwhelming decision points.

From Coginitive-edge.com “The Future, Backwards method was created to aid in widening the range of perspectives a group of people can take on understanding their past and the possibilities of their future. The entrained perspectives of people within an organization give them a limited view of the present, and such entrained patterns of past perception can determine its future.”

I use the idea of building a future backwards diagram to achieve multiple goals. For me, it helps represent a map of more simple decisions or states and how those states appear to flow from historical perspectives to future perspectives (I try and visualize these forwards and backwards in time and sometimes representative of the decision points made now). Not only to represent as things were, as things are but as things may be and how decision points can lead to future states, surface emergent properties, show how systems adapt & evolve or how things fall back and fade away.

What I love about the ideas behind this future backwards mapping is that it is a visual representation of a complex “thing”. In my talk referenced below I tried to convey that a pterodactyl was misunderstood for YEARS but by visualizing it people were able to convey lessons learned and morph their understanding into a more complete understanding – a pile of bones is simply to incomprehensible of a place to be at to decide what something really is.

Even though this pterodactyl was wrong, it still led to a better understanding of it.

As for the following diagram that looks like a twisted paperclip – that is a Feynman diagram – a picture that conveyed a very complex interaction of subatomic particles that simplified calculation into manageable chunks and conveyed a way for people to communicate very complex and abstract things.

So what is “Future Backwards”?

The future backwards is a method of “sense making” designed/created by cognitive-edge. From Wikipedia “Sensemaking is the process by which people give meaning to experience. While this process has been studied by other disciplines under other names for centuries, the term “sensemaking” has primarily marked three distinct but related research areas since the 1970s: Sensemaking was introduced to Human–computer interaction by PARC researchers Russell, Stefik, Pirolli and Card in 1993, to information science by Brenda Dervin, and to organizational studies by Karl Weick.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking

Most of all for *ME* – its a diagram of something complex that I can apply a little science to in order to better understand, measure and predict from.

My Butchered Future-Backwards diagram – Getting Started

Again, this example image is completely my take on future-backwards and how I’ve used it to make sense of my work. I’ve used it to show an example “Desired” or “future state” and I’ve used it to show our “current state” and then a “concerned state”. The example current state is not positive or negative but the reality of what is driving the business. (nor is this really the objective of the process as described by cognitive edge)

In some cases mapping this out can help you reinforce what you need to succeed. If you need to “keep the lights on” that “current state” may be the most important thing. This was one of the most important things I let escape my mind in my talk about simple diagrams such as this – the visualization of complex parts & decisions that are often lost in translation as teams are making huge leaps into new territory almost as an act of faith rather than a testable hypothesis of “will this work and how can we know”. You may see that you need to distribute work – hand off the “keep the lights on” to an “SRE” team but move the “future” state to an engineering team that can have the focus, budget and resources needed to sustain apparent states.

Emergence

When you map our a “Future backwards” diagram you have done some work on visualizing your work and through these representations you can simplify the calculations and more importantly the communications of what works, what didn’t work and what may have worked better or worse than you expected. You can see if decisions lead to alternate paths or if systems/processes you thought would diminish were actually surfaced and expanded. This process of comparing and looking for variance is how I see adaption, exaptation or even extinction. It’s where I “borrow” another method of setting up some of these decisions / states as “safe to fail” experimentations just to know if they’re viable and surfacing or buffering desired or undesired states & outcomes.

Adaptation / Exaptation

By visualizing your future backwards, you may see patterns that surface all the time or patterns that seem to evolve to always survive even in states you didn’t predict them to be. This is hard to quantify unless you’re mapping them out and you may never recognize such value or in some cases, patterns of failure unless you *do* map it out. Some things can be so well entrenched that you may need to represent them in a future-backwards diagram in much finer granularity than the broad-stroke decision graphs i’ve shown in my examples.

In this example future-backwards map I broke things out a bit more specific to a use case and showed how its less a concern of good/bad/status quote but more a realization of containers, physical machines or virtual machines and possible divergence & convergence routes between the paths.

In the above example a Java shop may choose to do design choices of all of the above or one or the other and you can visualize this to show how two decisions may be similar enough that they converge and the others may be divergent.

I could cite examples all day long, but I just wanted to give more breadth to my talk to try and answer some of the questions that came up and whatever I missed in my 5 minute ignite 🙂

A Lightning talk is a darn near impossibility on this topic, but I hope to one day master it because I think 5 minutes of future-backwards has a payback impossible to to quantify to those who embrace it and butcher it for their own way to improve communications & awareness. Here is my deck from DevOpsDays Austin 2015.

Byron miller ignite DevOpsDays 2015 – Future Backwards from Byron Miller

BTW, these diagrams are super simple to make if you have a modern wiki or website/editor with the “gliffy” plugin. Just use the standdard basic shapes and lots of decision triangles. It really only takes a few minutes to do but the payoff can be massive.

I look forward to hearing you’re use of such diagrams and what success/thoughts or feedback you get. (or if it fails, I want to hear that too..)

PS, I apologize @snowded if I’ve butchered your hard work, but it has inspired me to do awesome things, so take that for whatever it’s worth 😀

This is just a way to get you thinking and visualizing. Some people like to do super complex overall “Design sessions” and leave this stuff up to management but as a tech person who works with data, graphs and visualizations all day long it just made sense to bridge this gap not only as finding intent/design in my work but communicating it and formalizing it.

Best of all, when you draw this stuff up and put it up on a wiki, go back to it later and see if what you experience “jives” and make sure to discuss and map what worked/didn’t work to better understand and “make sense” of your own environment. BTW, Adaptation and Exaptation are wonderful things, you can really empower people when you see and foster their creative output and translate that or surface that through future states and its also pretty amazing when something created with different intent can be represented as having value even in places you didn’t expect them to be!

Map/draw/graph on!

Feedback on “Those first few steps”

On twitter & Skype I received lots of great feedback on dealing with anxiety – and not just anxiety on public speaking, but any kind of anxiety & triggers.

One of the web links that resonated with me the most with public speaking, anxiety and the buildup of fear was sent over by @UberGeekGirl, seriouspony – The method described here is awesome in that it isn’t trying to sell me something, isn’t trying to get me to deliver in a specific way or copy a pattern, it’s about changing the frame of mind and how you think of your presentation and what you do.  I’ve book marked the page and added it to my talk “kanban” I use so that every talk I do, I re-read that post so I don’t focus on everything I don’t need to focus on (what a stress reliever!). I wish I had thought of this myself and thank Jessica for sending me that link.

Some other suggestions I really liked were from @SoberBuildEng.  This one just make so much sense to me I wonder why I haven’t been practicing it. These little things you can do on a daily basis add up over time…  Practice Practice & Practice.

@byron_miller Oh, I thought of one other thing: force yourself to make conversation with strangers. Cab/shuttle drivers, people in airports

— @jpaulreed@mastodon.social (@jpaulreed) March 27, 2015

A great Book recommendation from Will – already purchased on my kindle 🙂 I’ve seen this pop up quite a bit.

@byron_miller @SoberBuildEng @UberGeekGirl Re: public speaking, best think I ever read was Burkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker

— William Haas Evans (@semanticwill) March 26, 2015

And more friendly advice from @UberGeekGirl – an excellent talk on great talks.  I know this is somewhat contrary to the Seriouspony link mentioned above of trying to focus too much on me and my talk style but in many ways, having a known formula that works is a huge piece of mind and definitely worth sharing!

@byron_miller @semanticwill @SoberBuildEng also http://t.co/BJT0pUqRqm

— Jessica DeVita (@UberGeekGirl) March 27, 2015

I also enjoyed seeing this on my timeline as I know I need to remind myself to take some time off.

https://twitter.com/sethvargo/status/580746573266739200

Sometimes I seriously feel some of my anxiety stems not just from perfection/workaholic mindsets but from the fact that having a work-life balance is hard when you have a day job & you’re concerned about working all night on talks (or whatever the engagement is)..  Being afraid of success is a weird thing to think of, but I do believe that if I’m honest to myself it probably is one of those factors in the anxiety. I haven’t been putting as much effort into “me time” as I should that I let the fear of having no “me time” prevent me from doing awesome. (please note, I work for HomeAway.com and I think its awesome they did this video as its just as fitting for the public as it is for its own employees)

I’ve promised myself (and my family) to use those vacation days, step away from it all and enjoy life and not let “yet another fear” make me that much more worried.  I’ve even planned out my calendar of “Me” days and tentative vacation plans well out through the next  year so as I do talks / CFPs and extra activities after work, they not only come second to my day job, but second to *me* and my family..  In a way, I’m already at ease as I feel a sense of relief  in planning this out that I know the “me” i’m concerned about is the “happy me” as I need to be, not the “me” I think I need to be for everyone else.

Thanks everyone for the great discussions and as always, if you have any advice or suggestions – i’m all ears!  In hindsight some of this seems so simple.. Hopefully some of what I shared helps you too!

Still working on it and I’ll provide more feedback after I do my next talks & speaking engagements!