SpringOne Platform 2017 Michael Cote, Pivotal "Most people putting DevOps in place have only the foggiest notion of what it is beyond a better mousetrap, and something about 'culture.' This talk uses failures and successes from DevOps-practicing organizations to give advice from the real world on getting DevOps started at your organization. “DevOps” has developed a vulgar definition that’s come to mean “whatever the things are we do that makes IT better.” While it’s annoying to have to spend the first 10 minutes of any conversation calibrating on what “DevOps” means, this points towards a broader need: organizations are desperate to improve how they create, deploy, and manage their custom written software. The goals of DevOps align perfectly with this need, though as organizations who try to “scale” DevOps are finding, DevOps doesn’t solve all of your problems. This talk will cover this framing of DevOps and then walk through several case studies of how (mostly large, but some medium and small) organizations are failing and succeeding at applying DevOps. In doing so, this talk provides advice for high level planning and then daily tactics for not only “doing the DevOps,” but improving the way organizations manage their stable of software."

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Not actually a DevOps Talk
Beyond “Survival is Not Mandatory”
@cote
#SpringOne 2017

2. Cover w/ Image
•@cote – Director, Marketing for
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
•Former industry analyst at 451
Research and RedMonk
•Corporate strategy & M&A at Dell
•Former software developer
•Register DevOps, agile, etc. column
•Podcasts: cote.io/podcasts
•More: http://cote.io or
cote@pivotal.io
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What’s in the
box?
Digital
transformation.

4. Software is
managing chaos
for users
Moving from unknown chaos to
the useful software
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5. Deliver value, reliably with small batches
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Sources: “Good Software is a Series of Little Failures,” Coté, April 2016; The Lean Startup, Eric Ries, 2011. The Lean Enterprise, Barry
O'Reilly, Jez Humble, and Joanne Molesky. See also overview of this approach at the IRS from Dec 2015. "Application Modernization,
Service By Microservice," Kurt Bittner and Randy Heffner, Forrester, Dec 2015; "Best Practices For Agile-Plus- Architecture," Randy
Heffner, Forrester February, 2015.

6. From 37% availability to $440m in back-taxes
• Only 37% of calls answered,
shrinking budgets
• From 2 year to 9 week
releases
• 2m+ users paid $440m in
taxes
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Sources: “‘Your IRS Wait Time is 3 Hours’ - Is Lean Possible in Government?”, Emily Price, Pivotal, April 2017; “Agile
Transformation is Product Management,” podcast, Oct 2017; “Minimum Viable Taxes: Lessons learned building an MVP inside
the IRS,” slides , Andrea Schneider & Lauren Gilchrist, 2015.
Before After

7. IRL astounding feats of digital transformation!
40%+ productivity/cost, rebooted member facing app
3+ week to 3 days, 50% reduction in incidents
A white-board to ~20 features a week, in 120 days
Sources: Crafting your cloud-native strategy, 2017, Coté; “From Commit to Production in 10 Minutes at a Century Old Insurance Company,”
Liberty Mutual, David Ehringer; Mojgan Lefebvre, Liberty Mutual, June, 2017; Air Force story, Washington Post, July 2019; “Agile
Transformation is Product Management,” Oct 2017. 11
Delivered 3x features year/year
40% policy strike rate, vs. 20% industry average
From 37% availability to $440m in back-taxes

8. 12Source: http://tirefi.re/

9. Agile & DevOps
Better software makes for better
business, but we think about
software wrong
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25+ years later, agile practices are still not standard
Source: “Survey Analysis: Agile Now at the Tipping Point - Here's How to Succeed,” Mike West, Gartner, June 2017; “Pair programming –
you’ll never guess what happens next.” Coté, Oct 2016.

11. Eliminate big, upfront analysis by using frequent
feedback
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Sources: "How the US Air Force Made Its ISR Network Cheaper to Run and Easier to Upgrade," M. Wes Haga, Oct, 2017; “Air Force
Intelligence Unit Goes Agile,” Charles Babcock, Information Week, June, 2017; “Limit upfront analysis by including frequent, real-world
feedback from users,” Coté, Nov 2017.
With a more agile approach, we pick a place to start and
get to a point where you can have an intelligent
conversation… a point where the requirements are 80%
done and the application is good enough.
A [waterfall] mistake could cost $100 million, likely
ending the career of anyone associated with that
decision. A smaller mistake is less often a career-ender
and thus encourages smart and informed risk-taking.”
““
- M. Wes Haga, US Air Force

12. Management
Key to success…or the kick-off to
frozen failure
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14. Cover w/ Image
Management’s own
changes• Driving strategy from the top
• Creating & championing boot-strap
teams
• Facilities changes, policy changes
• Policing/partnering new technologies
• Applying small batch to the org. itself
• Fighting the corporate change Eeyores
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“I can’t tell you what having a
leader stand-up in front of an
organization with a hoodie and
t-shirt does to cultural change.
It all the sudden makes it OK
for everyone within that
organization to participate in
change.”
-Matt Curry, Allstate

15. Agile
organizations
Transforming from a functional,
project-centric organization to
product-centric teams
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16. The organization supports the agile teams
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Ent Arch Portfolio Mgmt
Info Sec
Service Engineering
Capacity PlanningNetwork management
Ops/SREMiddleware Engineering
SW Arch
SW Dev
Client SW Dev
Service Governance
Ops
Cap Plan
SW Arch
SW Dev
Client SW Dev
CUSTOMER FACING APP TEAM
Ops
Cap Plan
Biz An
Prod MgmtData Arch
DBA
Biz An
Prod MgmtData Arch
SW Arch
SW Dev
Client SW Dev
LEGACY SERVICE TEAM
Ops
Cap Plan
Biz An
Prod MgmtData Arch
ENABLEMENT
Change Control
CUSTOMER FACING APP TEAM
PLATFORM TEAM
Source: “DevOps Who Does What,” Cornelia Davis, June 2017.

17. Agile teams
Transforming from a functional,
project-centric organization to
product-centric teams
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18. From coding 20% of the time coding to coding 90% of the
time
An agile methodology, proven
over 25+ years:
• Balanced teams w/all roles
needed, dedicated to the
product
• Paired programming, &
beyond
• Test-driven Development
• Short iterations
• Continuous Integration &
Continuous Delivery
26Source: “Don’t Forget People and Process in Your Digital Transformation,” Allstate case study, March, 2017.

19. Rule 1: Don’t go to meetings. Rule 2: See rule 1
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20. A real cloud
platform
Release management in the
bottleneck
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Source: “The Need For Speed: Drive Velocity And Quality With DevOps,” Robert Stroud &
Eveline Oehrlich, Forrester, Geb 2017.

21. A fully automated build pipeline & cloud platform
30Sources: “Speed Thrills: How to Harness the Power of CI/CD for Your Development Team,” Ben Kamysz &Jared Ruckle, Pivotal, Aug 2017.
(<= 5 days)

22. Standardize on a platform
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Source: “The Upside-Down Economics of Building Your Own Platform,” Jared Ruckle and Matt Walburn, 2017. Also, “DevOps Who Does
What,” Cornelia Davis, June, 2017; “How Platforms Work,” Casey West, August, 2016.

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DYNAMIC ROUTE SERVICES / API MANAGEMENT
APP MICROSERVICES TECHNOLOG Y
Spring Boot Steeltoe
Spring Cloud
Services
DATA MICROSERVICES
TECHNOLOG Y
Spring
Cloud Data
Flow
Cloud
Cache
RabbitMQ MySQL
YOUR APPLICATIONS
PLATFORM
Elastic Runtime Concourse
App
Autoscaler
PCF Metrics CredHub
Orgs, Spaces,
Roles and
Permissions
EMBEDDED OS
CLOUD ORCHESTRATION
CONTAINER ORCHESTRATI ONWindows Linux
Amazon
Web Services
Microsoft
Azure
Google
Cloud
Platform
Open Stack VMWare
SERVICE
BROKER API
PIVOTAL
CLOUD FOUNDRY
APPLICATION
RUNTIME
PIVOTAL
CLOUD FOUNDRY
BOSH
MODERN
CLOUD NATIVE
PLATFORM
MULTI CLOUD

24. Scaling tactics
Scaling the change to your
organization – small batch it!
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25. Starting: “pilot low-risk apps, and ramp-up.”
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Sources: Home Depot meetup, Oct 2015; Humana at CF Summit 2015; EU payday loan company; Pivotal Labs on large auto company;
“Getting started,” Coté, Oct 2016; Comcast’s Christopher Tretina at SP1 2016; “Cloud-Native at Home Depot, With Tony McCulley,”
Number of AI’s equates to ~130 apps composed on ~900 services.

26. Managing the change: pace yourself
• Scotia Bank after 10 months, 29 teams, 21 apps in
production in 4 countries, and 3k deploys/month
• Liberty Mutual 10 (simple) apps in 10 weeks
• Allstate 16 apps in a year
• THD ~130 apps in a year
• Auto manufacture ~115 after two years
• BUT! If you don’t start, you’ll suffer analysis paralysis
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Sources: “Cloud-Native at Home Depot, With Tony McCulley’; “Don’t Forget People and Process in Your Digital Transformation,” The New Stack, March,
2017; Pivotal customer analysis, cases, and conferences.

27. Internal marketing:
Everything, frequently
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28. 44http://cote.io/cloud2 - also in Chinese!

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“We are uncovering better
ways of developing software
by doing it and helping others
do it.”
- The Agile Manifesto, 2001
Thanks!@cote | cote@pivotal.io

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