How SAS Institute Drove Digital Transformation Through DevOps - AppSphere16

How SAS Institute drove digital
transformation through DevOps
Carl Hutchins
Senior IT Manager | SAS Institute Inc.

Agenda Topics
• My Story
• A little background
• Before – Pure chaos
• Transforming
• Now - The New World
• Next Generation DevOps
• Digital Transformation
• IT Analytics
• SaaS
• DevOps Key Tenants
• Continuous Delivery
• Recruiting for the future

My Story – a little background
SAS Institute Inc.
• World’s largest privately held
software company
• Founded in 1976
• 40 years young
• Market leader in Advanced
Analytics software
• Headquarters in Cary, NC
• 14,000 employees
• Customers in 139 countries
• 2014 Revenue of $3.09 Billion
3

SAS Business Units
Education, Marketing, Finance, Publications,
Contracts, HR, Legal, Tech Support, Corporate
Services
IT Core Services
Web, IaaS,
Systems (Unix & Windows, Storage)
Security (GIS),
Backups,
Network, Helpdesk, Service Desk
Enterprise Solutions
Project Managers
Business Analysis
Developers
Resource Managers
Development Managers
My Story – a little background
Partnering with the Enterprise Solutions Division

My Story - a little background
Technologies and Solutions

My Story - Before
Monitoring Individual Elements
• Nagios – 1,000 Checks
• Check_MK
• Wily Introscope APM
• Network Monitors
• Database Monitors

My Story – Before
Monitoring Individual Elements – The Results

My Story – Transforming
Partnering: Development, Operations & Vendors

Taking the Leap with APM
• Evaluate - Drop solutions that are not
working
• Feedback Loop - Adjust your processes
and technologies as needed
• ROI – Cost benefit
• Agile - Rapid evaluation and adoption

Key Point - Add Business Value
• Identify business areas that have a problem
that needs solving
• Work together to solve the problem
• Don’t loose focus on your key objectives
• Accept the journey may not be fully defined
• Listen to the business requirements and
feedback

My APM Journey
• Evaluate
• Identified the current APM solution was not
effective
• Too much time to instrument
• Watch for solutions / tools not being used
• Feedback
• Listen to developers
• Listen to operations

My APM Journey
• ROI
• Saving time is saving money
• Availability – outages cost money and
reputation
• Agile
• Rapid assessment
• Hack-a-thon for controller implementation
• Deployment with Dev -> Test -> Prod
Methodology

My Story – Now
Flow map and Scorecard
Flow map

My Story – Now
Flow map and Scorecard
Score Card

My Story – Now
Changes in the Development Cycle
• Issue: Point of Sale System not refreshing menu items
• Root Cause: 70 JDBC Calls
• Developers are now using AppDynamics to solve problems
• Used in Software Development
18

Next Generation DevOps
Digital Transformation
• A lift in engagement
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Increased data capacity and customer consumption
• Cost savings
• Greater conversions

• Condensing systems
• Global SaaS Solutions for Corporate Services
• Consistent business rules
• Less business support required

• Reducing IT and Business Support burdens
• Less is better
• Technical Debt – “why do I care”

• Increasing Data available for IT Analytics
• Capturing data from more systems and applications
• Provide business detailed reporting
• Using Visual Analytics for business reporting

• Providing a single “truth” for data
• Business Question:
“How many employees work for the company?”
Using one global SaaS solution to provide the
single source of truth for this question.

IT Analytics
• Measure my services
• Incorporate customer
satisfaction
• Big Data within IT Analytics

IT Analytics
• Everyone using same data sets
• Consistent set of global rules
• Usage is everywhere:
• Customer feedback
• Human Resources
• Finance
• Corporate Services
• IT - Hardware failure prediction
• IT – Data Center Metrics & Costs
• IT – Server placement in the
data center
• Marketing

IT Analytics
• Customer Retention Project
• Predicting if the customer will renew
• Analytics in Action
• Access data from Tech Support
• Capture data from click streams
• Use data from pipeline futures
• Access information from contracts
• And more data sets were used…..
• The data is there
• Bring it all together
• Derive patterns
• Solve for Business Problems

IT Analytics
• Data Center Analytics
• Use data from DCO Facilities
• Power Usage
• Temp Sensors
• System Sensors
• Use data from Asset Management
• Determine where to deploy systems
• The data is there
• Bring it all together
• Derive patterns
• Solve for Business Problems

Now that you have SaaS and DaaS - What now?
• Integration with SaaS
• Utilizing “Secure Sessions” for Password Management
• Utilizing Message Bus or REST API

• Manage and monitor data flows between systems
• Proactively identify long running jobs or increasing failures
• External “Out of Band” Monitoring SaaS services

• Fewer systems globally to support
• frees up staff and reduces Technical Debt
• Growing use of on-prem large complex systems

• Increases the integration between SaaS solutions
• Provide data feeds to each other
• Keep one source of the data

DevOps: Key Tenants
• Selecting the right platform
• Don’t get stagnant
• Be willing to make changes in technologies

DevOps: Key Tenants
• Incorporating services
• Don’t pick a solution to be all things

DevOps: Key Tenants
• Partnering w/ business
• Business driven goals
• Alignment with the business

DevOps: Key Tenants
• Endless Puzzle
• Understand it will never be complete
• The puzzle pieces will change
• Build the framework (start with the edges)
• You can’t do it all but you can address
real business needs and their goal dates

DevOps: Continuous Delivery
• Automation in Action
• Endless Releases – managing the chaos
• Seamless to the development cycle
• Moving off the workstation development platform
• Source Code Repositories

• Incorporating Services
• Without impacting Development
• Memory Leak Detection
• Testing Cycles
• Security Scans

• Platform Agnostic – Bring it On!
• Don’t get bogged down on runtime technologies
• Multiple deployment platforms
• Multiple runtime technologies

Recruiting your staff in a DevOps World
Previous Recruiting Techniques
1. Experienced niche skillset
2. Team player
3. Solid IT Foundation
4. Self driven or motivated individual
5. Customer Focused

Recruiting your staff in a DevOps World
New defining character qualities for recruiting
1. Self Satisfaction from “Puzzle Solving”
• Not just solving Incidents and Problems
• Managing complex systems
• Architecting solutions
2. Customer focused
3. Embraces change
4. Emotional Intelligence
5. Solid IT Foundation

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How SAS Institute Drove Digital Transformation Through DevOps - AppSphere16

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