1. DevOps – what is it and why
is it valuable to business?
Paul Swartout
2. Who am I?
• Husband, Father, dog owner, software development manager and
author of 'Continuous delivery and DevOps: A quickstart guide” – now
in it’s 2nd edition
• Over 20 years experience in IT - development, operations and
management
• Passionate about delivering quality software solutions
5. Agile Manifesto (2001)
• We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and
helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
• That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the
items on the left more.
24. Did DevOps work for MixRadio?
• 2010 (Nokia Music)
• 4 major (and painful) releases
• Over 200 people involved in a
given release – including top $
brass
• Live downtime required to release
software
• Release issues cause additional
downtime
• We shipped a handful of features
• 2016 (MixRadio)
• One engineer needed to release to
production (takes <15 mins)
• Everyone can see what’s
happening on the live platform in
real time
• Down-time is a dim and distant
memory
• Release related incidents are
unheard of
• Features delivered within 6wks on
average
25.
26. Key business benefits – the business view
• Cost reduction and removal of waste
• We don't need as many people to ship software so they can spend more
time creating more of it
• Predictability and competitive advantage
• Time to market can be counted in weeks not quarters
• Innovation and experimentation
• We are able try new things and take measured risks (such as moving entire
platform to two cloud providers with no user impact or downtime)
27. Key business benefits - the team’s view
• We can now focus our energies on building new features and
capabilities - not on trying to deliver them
• Delivery is just another task we do
• We have a greater understanding of our live platform and how it is
used
• We work together and trust each other - no more “my precious”
conflicts
• No blame = chance to learn and improve
• We feel like we add value
28. Summary and learnings
• CD & DevOps is not a silver bullet and it’s not just about tooling and
technology
• CD & DevOps can only help if you have a problem to solve
• Cultural change is not an easy thing to implement and takes time,
dedication, effort and patience
• Some people may not want / be able to work this way
• You need to measure progress and keep measuring - inspect and
adapt
• Incentivise against a common goal
29. Where to start?
• Get influential people / person enthused and engaged
• You’ll need “buy in” from decision makers
• Identify problems to solve
• Maybe focus on a small but problematic part of the platform which is difficult
to release
• Identify and enlist those who will help drive things forward
• Stick to (P)lan (D)o (C)heck (A)djust cycle
• Run some “safe to fail” experiments and learn from them
• Have fun and enjoy the experience
• Buy a book and do some reading