Continuous Delivery Decision Points

Kelly LooneyDevOps Strategy

Kelly Looney - Who am I? I’ve spent too much time with computers…• 30 years in Software Development• Smalltalker in the 90s – Kent Beck, RPG, Adele

Goldberg…• Long-time Agilist - Larman, Rubin, Leffingwell,…• Most recently a DevOps “helper”

• ThoughtWorks – Jez Humble, Martin Fowler• Now a part of the Agile Infratructure startup Skytap

helping with DevOps strategy

Worked with all sorts of organizations on all types of software

What I’d like to talk aboutCollaboration and Decision making about software• Scaling Agile development is a topic of keen interest

• Scaling any kind of software development still very difficult• DevOps is evolving from focusing on build/deploy automation to

full-on Continuous Delivery• Culture and Organizational issues are still there and still hard

• Both require collaboration and decision-making• Good news: for CD you can typically automate the results• Not-as-good news: for Scaling Agile you need a process• Environments are important for both and a next area of innovation

Scaling Agile DevelopmentBest advice: Don’t do it!

• Lots of agreement on Scrum and technical practices• Lack of agreement on how to scale: • SAFe, LeSS, Disciplined Agile, Scrum at Scale. … at odds over small

things• Something I find missing:

• Multiple teams all working on software that needs to interoperate• Old method: Design Interfaces (ICDs…), then argue, at some point test• New method: Collaborate, Demonstrate, Document• Meta-Scrum, Scrum-of-Scrums

• I find there is a need for visualization and planning

How is DevOps changing?We have shown really remarkable success in a short time…

• Initial focus was build and deployment automation• Lots of nice technology and a bounded problem

• DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015 in SF• “This is becoming a Continuous Delivery conference”• Good news IMHO – broad base of examples

• In a more difficult phase now• Automation is hard work• State of tests and test environments is pretty bad out there• Are we thinking about test at the right level?

Delivery Pipelines

Environments Proliferate with Modern Techniques

• Each box ideally represents a fresh environment• Unrealistic to have this many physical labs• Change and refresh can be costly and error-prone

Today’s Delivery Pipelines cont…

Ideas Code Revise Build Provision Test Deploy

Epics/Story/Tasks Editors/IDEs Version Control

Continuous Integration

Test Environments Pre-Production Production

Plans/Roadmap Code Entry Change tracking Executable Testable System Tested System Working System

With common Tools

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What DevOps and CD mean for the organization• The whole idea of holding off changes to retain stability

gets turned on its head• Change all the time and stay stable!

• Changes get smaller and smaller, but are constantly being deployed

• With small changes integration issues become fairly simple

• Environments must proliferate along with associated infrastructure• Ideally you need a new test environment to test every

change • Create/Destroy quickly and efficiently• Are your environments captured as code?

• Use Cloud services here, even if you don’t want to for production

Decision Points for SoftwarePromote to the next stage, or iterate again?

• Classic automation mistake – find every test you can automate and put it into the “suite”

• Results: lots of crappy new code to maintain! All night runs…• Remember: Tests are now as important as production code

• Goal: Carefully designed tests that answer the “promote” Q.• Manual tests need to get off the critical path to production• Full regressions (manual or automated) as well – just run them all the time• You want a fast way to move changes foreward with the sum of the tests

being something that gives you “enough” confidence.

The common threadCollaboration around Test – it’s a Strategic thing

• Integration and Delivery Pipeline Stages need a place

• Physical or Virtual lab – (virtual is where things are headed)

• Collaboration capabilities matter here• Meetings, Chats, Video, …

• Always the same pattern – move foward or iterate further

Thanks

Organization and Culture

Assessing Organization and Culture

Organizational issues:• Can teams be empowered to deliver? • Are they be capable?• Where are the “wait states”? • What are the alternatives?

Culture:• What should you value to meet your goals?• What Leadership signals need to change?

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Cultural changes needed• Old style Developers

• Responsibilities: Write code• Focus: Know ONE THING really really well. • Deep expertise = respect

• What we want now is Developers that:• Understand our company goals • Understand requirements and tests• Write, build, integrate, and test code incrementally • Can demonstrate and explain working systems • Maintains his/her code in production• Understands operations

Deep expertise is great, but varied knowledge is just as important

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Wow, you want developers to do everything…

• First the right attitude…then• Todays Tools and Processes:

1. Scrum provides continuous “customer” access2. Distributed versioning (typically Git) puts full source control

into individual developers hands3. Continuous Integration isolates mistakes4. Jenkins-Vagrant-Puppet-Chef-Saltstack pipelines make

infrastructure and deployment mostly automatic regardless of complexity

5. Monitoring lets you see your running service

How is that possible?

Containers are changing hosting• Virtualization efficiency and cost savings are obvious

• The most interesting issue is the separation of concerns presented• “developer-land” vs infrastructure

What do Containers/Microservices mean for me?

You will use them, but as usual the transition will be arduous

• A lot of the excitement involves startups doing green field apps• Fully transitioning a legacy app involves a lot of work and risk• An incremental approach involving some microservices carved

out of a legacy app makes more sense in most cases• You need a virtual environment with both VMs and Containers working

together• Skytap provides this to help with the transition

Environments as a ServiceEnvironment: Core Client Applications

Config1: Shared Resources

Config2: Application Under Test

On-Premise Resources

Test Mgmt Server

Database Hot

Database Standby

Active Directory

Load Generator

Load Balancer

DMZ Network

Web Network

DB Network

Corporate Network

Published Service On-Premise

Resources

WebServer

WebServer

Skytap Enables Hybrid AppsAccelerate and Modernize Enterprise Development

Accessible from any tool chain

Designed for Dev/QA/IT Collaboration

Environments that mix traditional and modern frameworks

Infrastructure choice Compute Storage Network Compute Storage Network Compute Storage Network