DevOps gets all of the press right now (and rightfully so in many respects). If you haven’t already, you should subscribe to DevOps Weekly and enjoy some great, curated articles from around the web specifically targeted at anyone even slightly interested in DevOps.
This post isn’t specifically about DevOps, but it is about how I am trying to navigate the torrent of information about DevOps and apply it to my work at Martin Luther College. As a small liberal arts college focusing on training the next generation of pastors and teachers for a conservative Lutheran synod, many of the items that DevOps proponents talk about don’t directly apply to what we do here.
However, there are things that DO apply … sometimes with only some very minor tweaks. So I’m going to go ahead and coin the term SmallOps so that I have some sort of umbrella term to cover these sorts of topics from a slightly different lens. SmallOps is my attempt to take the overall shift in how IT Operations works in the world and apply it to some of the smallest groups and applications out there. I’m working in higher education, so my bias will be quite apparent.
The idea isn’t to think that SmallOps is so much different from the larger realm of DevOps, but that SmallOps is a specific part of the greater whole of IT Operations with needs that larger shops don’t necessarily have. I’m hoping future writing can bring some of this to light.