More than legacy technology or architecture, the emergence of monoliths often comes down to a lack of clear boundaries and responsibilities between teams. Should every team own and maintain their own instances and flavors of the CI/CD tooling (since it’s all codifiable now, right)? Or do we need a CI/CD team to handle the tooling and infrastructure for everyone else in the org? Or a CI/CD platform providing out-of-the-box solutions that can be customized by application teams to fit their specific needs? Join me to find out what the answers to these questions have to do with cognitive load, team interactions, and the co-evolution of CI/CD boundaries and responsibilities.

1. TeamTopologies.com
@TeamTopologies
Manuel Pais
co-author of Team Topologies
@manupaisable
DevOps Sydney meetup - 01 Oct 2020
Avoiding the CI/CD Monolith
with Team Topologies

2. 2
Manuel Pais
Independent IT organizational consultant and trainer
Ex-dev, ex-build manager, ex-tester, ex-QA lead
LinkedIn instructor on Accelerating Continuous Delivery
Twitter: @manupaisable
LinkedIn: manuelpais

3. Team Topologies
3
Organizing business and
technology teams for fast flow
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais
IT Revolution Press (2019)
https://teamtopologies.com

4. “Any organization that designs a
system (defined broadly) will
produce a design whose structure is
a copy of the organization's
communication structure.”
– Mel Conway, 1968
4

5. “if the architecture of the system and
the architecture of the organization
are at odds, the architecture of the
organization wins”
– Ruth Malan, 2008
5

6. “if your architecture doesn’t
fundamentally support
Continuous Delivery, then
you’re going nowhere”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wnd-eyPoMo

7. 7

8. 8

9. 9

10. 10

11. 11
facilitates knowledge via
● training, workshops
● tool/framework selection
● pairing on examples
● guidance on good practices
● mentoring, coaching
Enabling Team

12. We need a team-centric
approach for sustainable
CI/CD, not tool-centric
12

13. 13https://info.acloud.guru/resources/brazeal-how-your-org-predicts-your-ci/cd-pipeline

14. Centralized vs decentralized
CI/CD is missing the point
14

15. • Upfront decision on requirements for Continuous Delivery
• “One size fits all” (monolithic thinking)
• Overgrown home tools diverge from/don’t support emerging new practices
Centralized CI/CD anti-patterns
15

16. • Poor levels of resilience, maintainability, scalability (“hanging from wires”)
• Fragile tool chain integration causes frequent, hard to diagnose failures
• Slow evolution of the tooling and practices (“CD = pipeline”, right?)
Decentralized CI/CD anti-patterns
16

17. We need to clarify and
evolve the CI/CD boundaries
& responsibilities over time
17

18. 18
How to encourage both:
sharing good practices & tech
and
autonomy & ownership

19. 19

20. “Cognitive load is the total amount
of mental effort being used in the
working memory”
- John Sweller
20

21. Intrinsic (skills)
Extraneous (mechanism)
Germane (domain focus)
21

22. (Intrinsic)
] Extraneous [
Germane
22

23. CI/CD as a Platform
23

24. “A digital platform is a foundation of
self-service APIs, tools, services,
knowledge and support which are
arranged as a compelling internal
product.”
– Evan Bottcher, 2018
24

25. 25
A platform is an ever evolving
curated experience for
internal customers.

26. Higher Level
Abstractions
26

27. Build Test
30 mins 15 mins
Security
Tests
Deploy
27

28. Build &
Unit Tests
Static
Analysis
Accept.
Tests
30 mins 15 mins
Security
Tests
Deploy
28

29. “The objective is to eliminate unfit
release candidates as early in the
process as we can and get feedback
on the root cause of failure to the
team as rapidly as possible.”
– Continuous Delivery, 2010
29

30. Build &
Unit Tests
Static
Analysis
Accept.
Tests
30 mins 15 mins
Security
Tests
Deploy
30

31. 31
Pipeline fail criteria:
1. test fails
2. test coverage decreases
3. code health decreases
4. new vulnerabilities
5. build time > 10m
6. execution time > 1h

32. Build &
Unit Tests
Static
Analysis
Accept.
Tests
30 mins
Security
Tests
Deploy
32
• Overall code health same or better
• No blocking code issues introduced
• Tests pass with growing coverage
• No new vulnerabilities
• Build time <= 10m
• Execution <= 1h

33. Build &
Unit Tests
Static
Analysis
Accept.
Tests
30 mins
Security
Tests
Deploy
33
• Overall code health same or better
• No blocking code issues introduced
• Tests pass with growing coverage
• No new vulnerabilities
• Build time <= 10m
• Execution <= 1h

34. 34
accelerate flow
reduce cognitive load
CI/CD
services

35. Developer Experience
#DevEx
35

36. 36

37. 37
Scale Your DevOps Initiative Beyond its Awkward Teenage Years - ABN AMRO Bank

38. 38
https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/08/27/how-we-improved
-developer-productivity-for-our-devops-teams/

39. Ops Experience
#operability
39

40. 40

41. Biz Experience
#BizEx ?
41

42. 42https://dzone.com/articles/user-personas-and-pipeline-faccedilades-for-effect

43. 43https://dzone.com/articles/user-personas-and-pipeline-faccedilades-for-effect

44. 44
Product Owner Mobile Developer
Ops Engineer Data API Engineer

45. 45

46. 47

47. 48
Collaboration
● two teams working together
● defined goal or outcome
● specific time period
● mutual respect is required

48. 49
strong collaboration with
stream-aligned teams for
any new service or evolution
Platform Behaviors

49. 50

50. 51
X-as-a-Service
● one provides, one consumes
● clear service expectations
● emphasize UX / DevEx

51. 52
improve usability and
reliability of services through
great documentation,
transparency and
service mindset
Platform Behaviors

52. 53

53. 54
Expect to collaborate with a few
teams to validate use cases and
abstractions for each new service.

54. 55
The hard problem about
platforms are trust and
effective team interactions.
Clarify & grow these first.

55. Team Topologies
56
Organizing business and
technology teams for fast flow
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais
IT Revolution Press
Order from Amazon or other retailers:
https://teamtopologies.com/book

56. Workbook
coming soon...
Team Topologies
for Remote Teams
57
for Remote
Teams
Resources: teamtopologies.com/remote-first
Icon by Pixel perfect from www.flaticon.com

57. Remote-
Friendly
Training
🠊 teamtopologies.com/
training
58

58. Resources
59
teamtopologies.com/resources
linkedin.com/learning/devops-foundations-
accelerating-continuous-delivery-in-the-enterprise
dzone.com/articles/
user-personas-and-pipeline-faccedilades-for-effect
slideshare.net/ManuelPais/
treating-your-pipeline-as-a-product-full-day-workshop

59. Thank you!
teamtopologies.com
60
Matthew Skelton, Conflux
@matthewpskelton
Manuel Pais, Independent
@manupaisable
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