1 month into DevOps

It's been over a month now since I became a DevOps engineer. It has been quite exciting to be honest. There are and have been some major issues but the way of working has enabled me/us to approach the whole situation with a very positive outlook, if this is the way we mean to carry on.

Working for an ISP, you would expect internet connectivity to be the major infrastructure to sure up as a pillar of the company. So during the fourth week of my new role we had a major outage - there was a broken uplink from our provider - which left us with a three hours internet outage. This outage affected us as much as our customers and clients.

Working for any other company, I would have expected managers and directors to fly off the handle, blaming everyone else but themselves to why we had no secondary (redundant) link, or whatever angry and illogical reasoning they could muster in a panic. But none of this happened here. Instead, our CTO handed out flash cards and asked us to write down any observations we could make about the situation, while he investigated and make few phone calls to ascertainment the situation.

After 20 mins or so, once we found out that our intermediate connection was broken and we gathered we could not do anything but wait for the fix, we formed a round the table team and started work on all the immediate things we to do while we waited. This allowed us to prioritise and bring forward a few tasks (five or so) from our backlog. Energy was then was used effectively to complete these tasks which otherwise would have stayed in the backlog for a while more.

So instead of wasting time doing nothing while we waited for the fix, we focused and cleared some of the much needed backlogs.