DevOps Ground Zero Prepared for #DOXLON August’15

Obligatory Bio…• Reformed evangelist

• Ex-Racker and stealth salesperson

• Moved from vendor to customer world

• Now leading people at Pearson

• Champion child stretcher —>

@chriswiggy

About Pearson• Origins of Pearson date back to 1724

• Pearson was incorporated in 1844

• Our company is as old as Morse Code!

• Started as a building firm in Yorkshire

• 40,000 global employees in 70 countries

• Over 36,000 OS instances deployed

• Managed by a team of 100

• Reality check - I’m modernising a 171 year-old company!

What Have I Done? Better question is why…?

How I Feel Some Days…

How I Feel On Other Days…

“IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS NOTHING, WHICH EXPLODED…”

TERRY PRATCHETT

What Is Ground Zero?

“Governance” is what companies implement in the absence of common sense…

Anti-Patterns for Large Enterprises

• Things that suggest you are at DevOps Ground Zero:

• Every release or change to the infrastructure is a step into the unknown

• There are a lot of monitoring systems, but not much monitoring going on

• The main thrust of your job is to slow, control and protect “the business”

• You feel like the police for people who will not submit change requests

• You could find/replace Parts Unlimited with your company and consider the Phoenix Project a piece of non-fiction…

Hang In There Someone has to make a start…

How To Start The Ball Rolling

• In EVERY single company, there is someone trying to change… Make it your job to find them, understand their problems and find a common enemy

• In EVERY single company there is a leader looking to disrupt the status quo… Make it your job to embolden them with Technology

• The requirements of developers are pretty CONSISTENT, find a way to increase your RELEVANCE by getting your hands dirty and doing something

• Do the OPPOSITE to what your business normally does with projects and funding requests, why continue with a pattern that is not working?

• Start small and stay LEAN scale and build only to the limit of what is currently required

What Am I Planning?

• Customer Engagement Plan

• Don’t come with the “IT Stick”

• Relevance Strategy

• Engage developers on hard problems

• Technology Approach

• Fast, Fast, Fast

• Operational Model

• Embedded Site Reliability Engineers

• NO DEVOPS TEAMS!

Project Bitesize

What Are We Going To Measure?• Candidate Application Performance

• Time to Deploy (Commit to Release) vs current base line

• Deployment Frequency vs current base line

• Mean Time to Recover Service vs current base line

• Infrastructure Efficiency

• Delta swing between at-rest and peak spend on a daily basis

• Container density/host optimisation

• Monitoring Value

• Incident avoidance due to triggered automation/remediation

• Check coverage across all application and infrastructure code base

• Backlog generated from monitoring insights driving better customer experience

Technology Approach

• We’re a start-up inside an Enterprise… we only live until our funding runs out

• The trick is to keep the funding coming by showing growth

• We’ll carry as little baggage from our parent company as possible

• We will challenge ourselves to always build for containerisation

• Our obligation is that our initial product scales to multiple use cases - shared services

• We need to show the rest of the company how to build robust containerised apps

• The acid test is “can my CIO deploy this?”

Tips for Turning Oil Tankers• Do not wait for someone else to start

working differently, everyone might be waiting for you!

• Start small and control scope, don’t get tempted into talking your idea into obscurity

• Engage the tough partners early, you’ll feel the pay off later when working practices are established together

• Build an open community, make your work accessible and interactive in order to facilitate a “me too” culture

My Advice for Others?

Thank You