Post on 26-Jan-2017
An Example of a End to End Stack for the Container Age
Chris Jackson May 2016
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qingqing. Shutterstock
Me
Ex-Racker
Frustrated Coder
Education Disrupter
Reformed Leader
This…
@chriswiggy
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My Work
Inspiring Mission
Passionate People
From ISBN to FQDN Embrace the Challenge
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How Well Do You Know Pearson?
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Quiz Time - Which of these do you think Pearson has owned or owns?
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We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when
we created them.Albert Einstein
Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.Albert Einstein
Pearson Today
Becoming a digital education leader
40,000 staff globally
Over 30,000 servers and 2,000 apps
400+ Developer Teams
Diverse portfolio of applications
Application Portfolio Today
• Complicated • Monolithic • Difficult to Change • Slow Moving
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Technology Operations
• Pearson’s central IT organisation • Victim of “Shadow IT” • Application Cemetery • Fragmented approach • Bottlenecked customers
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What Did Our Developers Think?
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Review - Problem Statement
• Internal IT bureaucratic and slow to deliver • Lack of standards in application design and build
• Spotty adoption of QA and Security standards
• Release process is manual, slow and high-risk
• Absence of collaboration between engineering and ops • Roadmap planning horizon is 3-years out
A perfect storm is brewing…
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Our Inception Point
• On the precipice of perpetually failing • Previous initiatives were huge programs
• Developers running their own tooling
• Business headwinds increasing • New leadership • End to end review of tech strategy
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• Appetite to do something different
• Appetite to do something different
• Appetite to do something different
• Appetite to do something different
• Appetite to do something different
• Appetite to do something different
Introducing Project Bitesize…
Bitesize - Born Different
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Bitesize - Timeline to Date
• August 2015 - Initial Pilot approved
• September 2015 - Alpha customer agreed • December 2015 - Bitesize chosen as preferred PaaS solution for Pearson
• December 2015 - Pilot closes, project extension agreed
• March 2016 - First non-production application environments loaded
• April 2016 - Full project funding approved
• June 2016 - First production workloads
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Question…
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Were we lucky, or was this by design?
“I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it”
Thomas Jefferson
Eating the Elephant
1.Our Approach
2.DevOps 3.Technology
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Products in Enterprise IT
Having a Product Approach Gets You: • Customer focus
• There is no Enterprise IT “Stick”
• A clear set of metrics to measure your success
• A dedicated commitment to iterate
• We’re a start-up in an Enterprise…
• Sustainable out of the box
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“Most organizations have a “project” mindset when it comes to software as well. The functional roles emerge
from their silos as needed to work on the project, and then disband once done. Good software development
benefits from a “product” mindset where the team, instead, stays dedicated to the product.”
Michael Coté https://medium.com/@cote/roles-and-responsibilities-for-devops-
and-agile-teams-fdacbffb4cb4#.4i8bm63t5
Serving DevelopersCreating a World Class Developer Experience…
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Why Containers?
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Open Source at Pearson
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Ingress ControllerPython Client Kubernetes Pack
KnowledgeEducation Sharing Information
Open Source Sharing Code
DevOps at Pearson
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What It SHOULD Be How It SCALES Out
We need a common and uniting initiative!
Marketing Slide…
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What’s In Our Product?
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“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once
you get there, you can move mountains.”
Steve Jobs
Delivery Pipeline
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I need a…
DevXOps
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Developers Operations
QA Security Network
Other functions are “channel partners” for the pipeline Delivered via a pull from a git repository
Runtime Environment
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Multi-Region Deployments
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Compute Region
A1
Compute Region
A2
Compute Region
A3
PII Data Region One
Compute Region
B1
Compute Region
B2
Compute Region
B3
PII Data Region Two
Global Platform Runtime & Orchestration
Regional Platform Services
Regional Platform Services
Infrastructure Repository Application Repository
Regional Configuration: Database Creation Database Credentials Character Set Language Pack
Global Configuration: Database Schema Database Connection String Localisation Context
If This… Then That - The New Operations
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Things that Happen Desired Response Mechanism to Execute
Stuff We Care About Stuff We Concentrate On
Trigger Systems WorkflowsTooling
“A synthetic transaction is failing”
“I want to deploy my application”
“Our A/B soak completed successfully”
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Re-spawn pods, notify owners
Execute deployment process
Converge all production instances to B deployment
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What Are We Doing Next?
Business Roadmap
Rubber stamping a product, not a project
Building a better home for a high-performing engineering team Developing a talent pipeline and career track for the future
Capability assessments for teams, applications, processes
Manage “change shock”
Alignment, alignment, alignment!
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Technical Roadmap
Data persistence on native containers
Logging solutions for Operations and Developers
Consistent access control and RBAC
Increasing deployment frequency of Platform
Expansion of the deployment DSL
Operations run-books
Intelligent Service Bots (aka Sentient Managed Services)?!?!
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Key Points
1.Running cool tech is easy, getting people on board takes time
2.Do not underestimate your impact on your company’s innovation
3.Tooling is a distraction in a higher-order value conversation
4.Think about your product and your direct and channel customers
5.Platform adoption drives application improvement and vice-versa
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The End to End Stack?
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Build It Run It
*Stuff in the Middle*
Trust & Feedback
Get Involved?
https://github.com/orgs/pearsontechnology/ More coming soon…!
@chriswiggy
We’re hiring… http://pearson-technology.jobs/
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