The document discusses lessons learned from trying to implement DevOps in a rapidly growing company. Some key lessons include: (1) being able to clearly articulate what DevOps means for both individuals and the organization; (2) trusting developers and providing them with what they need; and (3) starting DevOps efforts with a focus on development environments rather than just production. The document also emphasizes focusing on toolchains rather than individual tools, using a service delivery pipeline approach, and ensuring good communication and hiring practices.

1. Lessons learned trying to implement
DevOps in a rapidly growing environment

3. Local Community
Sustainable!

4. Thank you!

5. Lessons learned trying to implement
DevOps in a rapidly growing environment

6. Lessons learned trying to implement
DevOps in a rapidly growing environment
•
Lament of a Failed DevOps Manager
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Origin of this talk
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Excuses

7. Introductions
Michael Collins
Principal Systems Architect
!
http://www.demonware.net/
!
@ook
!

8. Demonware
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Online services for Console
Games
•
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SaaS APIs
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Cross platform SDKs
•
•
Middleware
Consultancy & Design
Part of Activision Blizzard

9. Demonware
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435+ million gamers
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3.2 million+ concurrent online gamers
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95+ games
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300,000+ requests per second at peak
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Avg. query response time of < .01 second
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Collect 500,000+ metrics a minute
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100 billion+ API calls per month

10. Lessons learned trying to implement
DevOps in a rapidly growing environment
3500
•
What is rapidly growing?
•
•
50-100% annual growth
People, Scale & Complexity
3000
2500
New Serv
2000
Re4red Se
Reused se
1500
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How Applicable are our lessons?
•
•
Servers Cu
Ops Staff
1000
This talk == Not technical
For DW Tech talks see:
500
0
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
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Erlang and First-Person Shooters in online games - Malcolm Dowse - Erlang
Factory London 2011
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PyCon.ie 2011 Keynote - Damien Marshall
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Puppet at Demonware - Ruaidhrí Power - PuppetConf ’12

11. A brief history of "DevOps"
at Demonware
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Early years (2003 - 2007)
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Focused on P2P, handful of Services, minimal data persistence, 10s of servers,
random hardware, Golden Images, Shell Scripts
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root for (almost) everybody!
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“NoOps”
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Early 2007 - Removed root access for developers
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April 2008 - Started to dabble with Puppet
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September 2008 - Automated installs (preseed), Standard Hardware, Puppet based
installs for production base
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Spring 2009 - Started to build OS packages for our stack
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June 2009 - DW Engineers attend Velocity for first time

12. A brief history of "DevOps"
at Demonware
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Summer 2010 - Rushed switch to Cobbler/CentOS, more Puppet driven by custom ENC - disabled noop
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January 2011 - First Ops Intern
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Early 2011 - Ops Re-Org, enter DevOps team
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August 2011 - First Engineer moved from Dev to Ops
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September 2011 - Move to Continuous Deployment for Puppet to Prod
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February 2012 - Work with DTO solutions on "Dev Environment provisioning blue print”
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March 2012 - Disband DevOps team, new Org Structure - first official Ops Software Engineer job title
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September 2012 - Rundeck in Production
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October 2012 - Internal hack-a-thon week to kickstart "Ops API”
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November 2012 - Ops API first release, read only cached access to Inventory system
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December 2012 - Our current Build engineer started
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December 2012 - Prototype v1 of internal IAAS API for bare metal provisioning
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February 2013 - First engineer transferred from Ops team to another team (Datawarehouse)
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March 2013 - First release of Build Engineering automated developer environment setup tool

13. Initial Thoughts on our
DevOps History
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Suspect Typical Evolution for Traditional Busy Ops & Dev?
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“DevOps” almost exclusively focused on Ops :-(
!
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Big Wins
•
•
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Building internal APIs
Continuous deployment of Puppet to Production
Big Losses
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Restricting Prod Access
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Starting with Prod & trying to retrofit
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Being stereotypical BOFHs

15. 10 Lessons Learned

16. 1 - Be able to clearly
articulate what DevOps is
What is
DevOps?

17. What does DevOps mean
for …
•
You
•
•
•
Day to Day
Big Picture
Your Organization
•
•
Boss
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Teams you work with
•
•
Colleagues
Leadership
Can you explain Clearly, Articulately & Concisely to everyone you deal with?

19. DevOps for me @
Demonware
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For me
•
•
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Day to day - “Automate all the things!”
Big Picture - “Service Delivery Pipeline, Organizational Sympathy”
For Demonware
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Colleagues - “Buzzword Bullsh*t - almost Cloud”
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My Boss - “DevOps within Ops, Visible Ops”
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Old Boss - “Developer Self Service; You build it, you run it”
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Leadership - “Bridge Dev vs Ops divide, maintain agility as we grow”
•
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Teams I work with - “We have to write puppet? What happened to the puppet guys? Wow puppet
sucks”
Everyone - “Something Michael rambles about”
PS. Above Quotes Fabricated

20. 2 - Trust your developers
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My Single Biggest Mistake
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Revoking developer access to Production
Ops be a good Customer for your Developers, provide:
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Requirements
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Bug Reports
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Examples
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Metrics & Data

21. 3 - Start with Dev
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Working on Automation for over 5 years
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Never quite useable in Development
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Almost exclusively focused on Production
Don’t do this
In 2013 easy to start with Dev
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Packer, Vagrant, Docker, Boxen etc
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First day: sign in, push “make go now”, get coffee, work

22. 4 - Toolchains not Tools
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Demonware - "We build & run services which use Erlang,
Python, RabbitMQ, MySQL & Cassandra with Hadoop for
Data Analytics”
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DevOps@Demonware were “The Puppet guys”
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Demonware Ops have:
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Nagios guy
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Elasticsearch/Logstash/Kibana girl
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Graphite guy

23. 4 - Toolchains not Tools
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CfEngine vs Puppet vs Chef vs Ansible
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Apache vs Lighttpd vs Nginx vs Jetty
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Who cares?
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What matters is:
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Using Configuration Management
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Using a HTTP server

24. Distinguish between Tools &
Toolchain Components
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Knowledge not Trade
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Components not Things
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Bezos Amazon Service mandate
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Containers / VMs / APIs / PaaS
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Describe not Proscribe

25. Operations
Development
5 - Service Delivery
Pipelines
??
??
??
??
Build
Run

27. Operations
Development
5 - Service Delivery
Pipelines
Build
Run

28. DevOps Toolchain & Service
Delivery
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Not my idea
•
•
ITIL Service Delivery
•
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DTO Solutions
Many Others
http://dev2ops.org/category/devops-toolchainproject/

29. 6 - Organizational Sympathy
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Mechanical Sympathy
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"Hardware and software working together in
harmony”
•
Martin Thompson, High Performance Low
Latency Specialist
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Blog & Mailing List

30. 6 - Organizational Sympathy
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Understand your organization
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Goals, Processes etc
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Then decide which Toolchain elements make sense to
re-use
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And what you have to build
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Your organization is not Etsy, Facebook or Twitter
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You can’t map their Toolchain & Processes without
appropriate Transformations

31. PHB Alert

32. 7 - Organizational Flexibility
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Org Structure not sacred
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Annual re-orgs normal?
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Examples
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Valve
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Internally
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Good - Engineers continuing
to work together post “reorg”
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Bad - Ops Area, Dev Area :-(

33. 7 - Organizational Flexibility
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Spend time in different roles
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Sit with other teams
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Google "Mission Control”
Gatecrash scrums
Understand your colleagues POV

34. 8 - Communication is Hard
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Timezones Suck
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Cultural differences are Hard
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Managing Growth without missteps is impossible?
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Most Nerds^wEngineers pick crappy mediums
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Face, VC, Voice, IM, Mail …
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No Silver Bullets
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Best Writing Advice for Engineers I've Ever Seen. Period.

35. 9 - Hiring Matters
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The biggest contribution I have made to
Demonware is managing to hire people who are
smarter than me
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Especially crucial for “DevOps”

36. 10 - Metrics & Data
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Business Metrics not CPU utilization
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Data justifies
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Change
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Resources
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Experiments

37. TL;DR

38. “How does <X> make it easier to deploy and
run our services?”

39. Aside - Puppet Continuous
Deployment
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Problem
•
•
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Automation just for system build & service prop
“Just stopping puppet, will fix later” - Divergence not Convergence
Solution
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Sledgehammer
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Toolchain
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Monitoring & Alerting based on Puppet (Internal Daemon & Nagios)
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“Positive” Policy enforcement - Disease build “bears”
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Code Review & Aggressive pushing (Git & Gerrit & Fan-out)
Testing - dcinabox
Result
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Most production hosts 100% puppet managed (working on staging)
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In large clusters Drain & Rebuild easier then troubleshooting

40. Looking Forward
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Distributed Configuration
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Promise Theory, Cluster State Transitions, Multiple Sources of Truth, Constraint Solving
Distributed System Platform Blocks
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Separating Infrastructure, Platform & Applications
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Containers
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Netflix / Twitter OSS Stacks
DC wide cluster scheduling
Scaling Organisations
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Remote Workers?
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Embedded Ops?
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Flat organizations?

41. DevOps Lessons Learned
1. Be able to clearly articulate what DevOps is at multiple Levels of Detail
2. Trust your developers
3. Start with Dev
4. Toolchains not Tools
5. Service Delivery Pipelines
6. Organizational Sympathy
7. Organizational Flexibility
8. Communication is hard
9. Hiring Matters
10. Metrics & Data

42. Surprise - We are Hiring!
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jobs@demonware.net
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http://www.demonware.net/
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@demonware
!
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Also food & some drinks later
are on us …

43. Questions?

44. Random
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Contenders for inclusion:
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Operational Acceptance
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Versioning
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Release Management
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Repository Management
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Agile!11!