The document outlines Siemens' journey in adopting the DevOps culture through the use of GitLab, detailing its transition from diverse developer tools in 2013 to establishing a collaborative and efficient platform by 2019. Key initiatives included building a recognizable brand, encouraging community engagement, and focusing on upstream contributions. The result was a significant increase in users and projects, alongside improved collaboration and reduced shadow IT.

1. Building the DevOps
Culture Across Siemens
GitLab Commit – London, October 9th 2019
#GitLabCommitUnrestricted © Siemens 2019

2. Fabio Huser
Software Architect
@fh1ch
Roger Meier
Principal Key Expert
@bufferoverflow

3. “A complex system that works is invariably found to
have evolved from a simple system that worked.
A complex system designed from scratch never
works and cannot be patched up to make it work.
You have to start over with a working simple
system.”
John Gall, 1975

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Siemens
Early Day Startup
● Founded 1847 in Berlin
● Werner von Siemens and Johann
Georg Halske as founders
● Backyard machine shop in Berlin
● First patent filed in jail
● First electric car built in 1905

5. Responsible, excellent and innovative
● Industrial, Electrical and Digital
● Independent Sub-Companies
● Focus on B2B
● No washing machines...
● Employees: ~380’000
● Software Developers: ~20’000
● Countries: ~190
● Open Jobs: ~5’600 ;-)
Power Generation Rail Automation Vehicle Systems
Industrial Automation Building Automation CNC Controls
Industrial Communication Medical Imaging

6. + =Siemens

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Our GitLab Love Story
GitLab in 2013
• Built by two people
• MIT license
• Developer self-service
Siemens in 2013
• Huge variety in developer tooling
• Just a few Git users
• No company-wide source code hosting
• Code-bases with +20 years of history

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code.siemens.com - The Brand
• A recognizable name is important
• Establish an ambassador circle
• Community identifies itself with brand
• Known people behind the brand
• We do have stickers...

9. • Strong collaborative mindset, cross silo thinkers
• Full Stack Engineers (Architecture, Development, etc.)
• Experience as open source contributor or maintainer
• The platform itself is used to build the platform
Team Charter of code.siemens.com, 2015

10. • Collaborate on code and share it within minutes
• Speed up Time to Market
• Empower people and push ownership culture
• Set the technological foundation for future business models
Vision of code.siemens.com, 2015

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Shared CI runners during the early days
“The term junkyard computing
is a colloquial expression for
using old or inferior hardware
to fulfill computational tasks
while handling reliability and
availability on software level.”
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_recycling

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No Help Desk
For developers, From developers
• Documentation Portal
• Issue tracker
• internal Social Network
• “Help Yourself”
Great engagement within the
community

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Upstream First - No Patches
• We deploy on a regular basis
• We only deploy from upstream
• We extend what we’re using
• Contributing to the eco-system
around GitLab
Contributing to GitLab is fun and easy

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Scale When Needed
Primary focus were non-functional requirements
§ Security, reliability, maintainability, analyzability
§ And the most important thing - Happy Developers
We had a single machine
until 20’000 users

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The Story Continues
GitLab in 2019
• Company with more than 800 employees
• Application architecture got more complex
• New features and better performance
Siemens in 2019
• code.siemens.com established
• Collaboration across all organizations
• Shadow IT significantly reduced
• Git and CI/CD is widely adopted

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The Numbers
Users: ~32’000
Projects: ~63’000
Notes: ~3’100’000
Countries: 70
Core team members: 8
CI Builds: ~16‘000‘000

17. ● Strategy and Transparency
● Focus on Customers
● Give and Take
● It’s about people
Key Takeaways

18. Thank you and Goodbye
GitLab Commit 2019