Emily Freeman on Modern DevOps - Episode 72

Today's guest is Emily Freeman who leads the modern operations team in cloud advocacy at Microsoft. She's also the author of the recently released book, DevOps for Dummies, which guides readers through the ins and outs of DevOps. On top of this, Emily is a very talented speaker and speaks all over at many conferences and advises many cutting-edge startups and some of the largest companies in the world on DevOps, engineering leadership, and developer engagement. She is known for her creative approach to identifying and solving the human challenges of software engineering

In this episode, Emily and Jeffrey are talking about modern DevOps. Emily discusses her new book, DevOps for Dummies; the differences and similarities between the cloud advocacy area in Microsoft vs. other tech sectors when thinking about putting together a DevOps environment; where DevOps is now; changes in the industry; what makes 'operations' modern; and her concerns and hopes for the future of the industry.

Topics of Discussion:

[:39] Be sure to visit AzureDevOps.Show for past episodes and show notes.

[:56] About today's guest, Emily Freeman!

[1:32] Jeffrey welcomes Emily on to the podcast.

[1:48] Emily talks about her new book, DevOps for Dummies, and what people can expect from it when they pick it up!

[2:27] Emily shares her journey into tech and how she ended up at Microsoft.

[4:24] Emily speaks about her strategy when writing DevOps for Dummies to target the newcomer to DevOps.

[7:42] Why the second version/rewrite of a system always fails and why you don't usually need to start completely from scratch.

[9:25] Emily talks about her new book and the possibility of writing new books in the future.

[10:27] Emily speaks about the differences and similarities between the cloud advocacy area in Microsoft vs. other tech sectors when thinking about putting together a DevOps environment.

[12:06] In one of Emily's talks, she speaks about firefighting, AKA putting out code fires. What does this mean? And how can we use this 'firefighter' approach to our benefit?

[16:26] A quick word from Azure DevOps Podcast's sponsor: Clear Measure.

[16:52] Jeffrey gives some quick announcements.

[17:30] Jeffrey and Emily continue the firefighter discussion!

[19:04] Where is DevOps now? Can it be defined by one definition?

[23:44] Over the last 6 or 7 years there are twice as many programmers in the industry — so what does this mean for the current industry?

[27:53] What other practices beyond continuous integration do people just tend to automatically reach for when they say they're doing DevOps?

[32:50] Emily shares her concerns and hopes for the industry.

[36:00] Emily explains what makes 'operations' modern.

[38:00] Emily recommends some resources to dig into more on the topics discussed today.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Azure DevOps

Clear Measure (Sponsor)

.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon!

bit.ly/dotnetdevopsebook — Click here to download the .NET DevOps for Azure ebook!

bit.ly/dotnetdevopsbookforcommunity — Visit to get your hands on two free books to give away at conferences or events!

Jeffrey Palermo's Youtube

Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events!

Jeffrey@Clear-Measure.com — Email Jeffrey for a free 30-point DevOps inspection (regularly priced at $5000!) — Spaces are limited!

EmilyFreeman.io

Emily's Twitter: @EditingEmily

DevOps for Dummies, by Emily Freeman

John Allspaw

Fred Brooks

The Agile Manifesto

Octopus Deploy
Redgate SQL Change Automation

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford

GitHub Actions

Stack Overflow

Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk, by Paul M. Duvall, Steve Matyas, and Andrew Glover

Niall Murphy

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, by Niall Richard Murphy, Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, and Jennifer Petoff

Want to Learn More?

Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.