In the beginning there was nothing... No, really, nothing. This talk is a snapshot of the first six months of working in a 150-year old Enterprise and my drive to establish new working practices, seed the through processes, organisational structure and beliefs that support DevOps and get senior leadership to buy into an approach that gives you the opportunity to prove you are right and break traditional decision making cycles. This talk will be an honest, sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying account of what it is like to build DevOps from zero which highlights good suggestions and patterns for people in similar situations but also the huge achievement associated with progress on this kind of work. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IrUqJ5yGJs Join DevOps Exchange London here: http://www.meetup.com/DevOps-Exchange-London Follow DOXLON on twitter http://www.twitter.com/doxlon

1. DevOps Ground Zero Prepared for #DOXLON August’15

2. Obligatory Bio…
• Reformed evangelist
• Ex-Racker and stealth salesperson
• Moved from vendor to customer world
• Now leading people at Pearson
• Champion child stretcher —>
@chriswiggy

3. 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!

4. What Have I Done? Better question is why…?

5. How I Feel Some Days…

6. How I Feel On Other Days…

7. “IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS NOTHING,
WHICH EXPLODED…”
TERRY PRATCHETT

8. What Is Ground Zero?
“Governance” is
what companies
implement in the
absence of
common sense…

9. 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…

10. Hang In There Someone has to make a start…

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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?”

15. 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

16. My Advice for Others?

17. Thank You