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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