Towards behavior driven operations (BDOps)

Modern Enterprise Software Systems entail many challenges such as availability, scalability, complexity and providing business agility. Ensuring the systems to be up and running for 24 × 7 has become a mandate for operations. Agile development has been adopted to keep pace with the demands of business and IT. Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior Driven Development (BDD) are practices, which enable agile development. So far the agile approach has been limited to development. For ensuring business to be truly agile, we need to take forward the agile approach to operations. In this paper, we discuss the behavior driven approach for operations specifically on the core sub-systems like infrastructure provisioning, deployment and monitoring. We share our explorations and experiments with Behavior Driven Monitoring (BDM) and how the same can be adopted for infrastructure provisioning and deployment. We used Cucumber-Nagios to detect behavior of an enterprise application. We close this paper with a note on the benefits to busmess and IT showing its relevance to DevOps, Continuous Delivery and Cloud Computing.