The Phoenix Project

by Gene Kim

Brent gets up and starts drawing boxes to indicate the packaging of the code for deployment; preparing new server instances; loading and configuring the operating system, databases, and applications; making all the changes to the networks, firewalls, and load balancers; and then testing to make sure the deployment completed successfully. I contemplate the entirety of the diagram, which surprisingly reminds me of the plant floor. Each of these steps is like a work center, each with different machines, men, methods, and measures. it work is probably much more complex than manufacturing work. Not only is the work invisible, making it more difficult to track, but there are far more things that could go wrong. Countless configurations need to be set correctly, systems need enough memory, all the files need to be put in the right place, and all code and the entire environment need to be operating correctly.