Back in late 2013 I joined what was jokingly referred to as the Red Hat IT “DevOps” team. We didn’t like that name, so we changed it and there-after became officially known as Team Inception. From the time the team was formed, we all accepted that the team was to retire in 18-24 months. We were totally cool with that too! To us having a pure “DevOps” team in perpetuity just didn’t make sense.

Over the course of the team’s lifespan I feel like I experienced incredible growth, both personally and professionally. I’m proud to look back at all the cool things we accomplished as a team, and I’m even more thankful to have had the opportunity to be a member of that team. Here’s a taste of some things we did as a team publicly:

• Blogged a bunch of posts for Red Hat Developer Blog
• Created a functioning Continuous Deployment system, Release Engine [Docs]
• Created jsonstats, a tool for exporting system information over a REST interface
• And another tool, Talook, which provides a view into jsonstats running on a collection of servers
• Cacophony, a simple REST API for automatic SSL certificate generation
• The Ansible XML module. This grew in popularity so much that we realized the best way to ensure it lives on was by transferring complete ownership over to Chris Prescott, a former contributor (Thanks Chris)!
• git-branch-blacklist – A git-hook based system for blacklisting pushes to specific branches

Two week ago (2015-06-20 → 2015-06-24) the DevNation and Red Hat Summit 2015 conferences were held in Boston, MA. Of the many excellent speakers and panel groups [S|D] that held sessions during the conferences, there’s one group I am especially fond of: My old team, Inception.

On Wednesday, July 24^th we held a panel session called Bootstrapping a DevOps Movement in Red Hat IT. This was our final activity together as Team Inception. During this panel-style session Jen Krieger, our Product Owner/Scrum Master, facilitated a look back at some of our experiences during our 18 months as the Red Hat IT “DevOp Team”.

We began the initial round of questions with what our individual perceptions of “DevOps” were before the team had formed. We followed that with what ended up being a great Q&A with the audience (thank you everyone who participated!). We ended the panel with our closing thoughts on what “DevOps” means to each of us now.

Here’s a snippet from the official session description:

Topics will include

• What we accomplished. We’ll take you step-by-step through how we deliver our work using a combination of open source tools, including Docker.
• How we rate both our cultural and tooling success.
• Roadblocks, disruptions, and surprises we encountered and how we handled them.
• How this project has changed the way we view our jobs and our work relationships.
• What’s next for the team.

Panel

• Tim Bielawa, Release Engineering / Development
• Ryan Cook, System Administration
• Steve Milner [blog], Security / Development
• Chris Murphy, System Administration

Panel facilitator

• Jen Krieger [pinterest], Agile Coach & Original Inception Product Owner

Between ourselves, we casually referred to this as our final team retrospective, an honest (and very public) look-back at lessons learned over the last year and a half.

Click play below to watch the full video now, or go directly to it on YouTube.

And before I forget. So much thanks to Andrew “Hoss” Butcher [GH] for recording, editing, and posting the recording for us. I (we) owe you many Tasty Beverages for that.