As development teams move toward a more agile development process coupled with continuous delivery (CD), the role of operations has evolved from a support organization to an integral part of the product delivery ecosystem. Today, operations organizations need to be agile in their feature delivery, but as requests come from different stakeholders, operations must balance their investments in support tasks, urgent tooling requests, and strategic projects. Sumedha Ganjoo explains why it is important for an operations organization to move toward CD and identifies process, tools, and development changes required for its implementation. Sumedha shares changes her team made to be more agile while planning and prioritizing work, as well as changes to development practices that helped the team move toward CD. To explore the benefits of an operations organization adopting continuous delivery and to see how you can start moving toward it, join Sumedha for this session.

1. DW1
Concurrent Session
11/8/17 11:30 AM
Operations in the Continuous Delivery
Ecosystem
Presented by:
Sumedha Ganjoo
National Instruments
Brought to you by:
350 Corporate Way, Suite 400, Orange Park, FL 32073
888---268---8770 ·· 904---278---0524 - info@techwell.com - https://www.techwell.com/

2. Sumedha Ganjoo
National Instruments
At National Instruments Sumedha Ganjoo manages projects for a global
operations team that services large software development. She spearheads the
continuous delivery effort in her organization. A certified ScrumMaster, Sumedha
has worked as a software engineer and project manager in various waterfall and
agile projects including open-source and university research projects, and
customer-facing and internal industry projects. In all her projects, Sumedha is
keen on driving iterative improvements. She is very passionate about promoting
better communication in and outside of work, and is an accomplished
Toastmaster.

3. 11/8/17
1
Continuous
Delivery in
Operations
Sumedha Ganjoo
Project Manager, National Instruments
What are we going to talk
about?
Adoption of continuous delivery
principles in Operations

4. 11/8/17
2
What are we not going to talk
about?
Team Structure
DevOps Vs Operations
Context
• Global team
• Tools and infrastructure used by 200-400 devs
• More than hundred thousand tests and ~50-100
submissions per day

5. 11/8/17
3
One year back…
• Projects were long and by the time they finished,
requirements or some tools had changed
• Developers were running into issues and were
complaining about tools
• Fixes to tools couldn’t be made available to developers
fast as roll outs were risky and took time

6. 11/8/17
4
It was time for change…
If it’s painful, do it more often

7. 11/8/17
5
Switched to a weekly release
cadence
2016 2017
Apr Jun Aug Oct Dec Feb Apr
0002
4/25/2016
0004*
5/19/2016
0006*
7/6/2016
0008
9/29/2016
0010
11/11/2016
0012
1/5/2017
0014
2/9/2017
0016
2/23/2017
0018
3/9/2017
0020
3/22/2017
0022
4/5/2017
0024
4/20/2017
0001*
4/21/2016
0003*
5/6/2016
0005*
5/27/2016
0007
8/29/2016
0009
10/24/2016
0011
12/16/2016
0013
1/19/2017
0015
2/16/2017
0017
3/2/2017
0019
3/16/2017
0021
3/29/2017
0023
4/12/2017
0025
5/4/2017
Dev
Practices
Tools
Continuous
Delivery
Processes

8. 11/8/17
6
Dev
Practices
Tools
Continuous
Delivery
Processes
Key Principles
• Keep the mainline healthy
• Automated testing
• Make core more testable
• Low tolerance for failure

9. 11/8/17
7
Keep the mainline healthy
• Release branch as close to mainline as possible
Cherry-picking the fix
from master
Main line
Release branch
X is fixed quickly
Feature X is bad
Scenario 1
Bug Y is fixed in main line much
later
Feature X is bad
R1 branch
R2 branch
Feature X is reverted
from Release branch to
be able to release and
bug Y is filed
Time of stabilizing the
release branch
increases.
Main line
z
z
Getting to a healthy mainline takes much longer
now:
• Longer the time from introduction, longer the
bug fix takes
• Other features build on top of buggy code
Scenario 2
Automated testing
• Standardized acceptance tests
• Unit testing

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8
Make code more testable
• Refactor & Re-architect
• Componentize
Low tolerance for failure
• Quality first
• Low infrastructure failure

11. 11/8/17
9
Dev
Practices
Tools
Continuous
Delivery
Processes
Key Principles
• Balance long term vs short term
• Minimal viable products

12. 11/8/17
10
Balance long term vs short
term
• Support vs feature requests
• Short term enhancements vs strategic investments
• Focused & regular prioritization
Balance long term vs short
term
• Support vs feature requests
• Short term enhancements vs strategic investments
• Focused & regular prioritization

13. 11/8/17
11
Balance long term vs short
term
• Support vs feature requests
• Short term enhancements vs strategic investments
• Focused & regular prioritization
Minimal viable products
• Groom features into MVPs
• Deliverable every iteration

14. 11/8/17
12
Dev
Practices
Tools
Continuous
Delivery
Processes
Key Principles
• Automated pipeline
• Reproducible, Reliable & Scalable Infrastructure
– Infrastructure as code
– Active resource monitoring

15. 11/8/17
13
Delivery Pipeline Practices
• Only Build Your Binaries Once
• Smoke-Test Your Deployments
• Deploy into a Copy of Production
• Each Change Should Propagate through the Pipeline
Instantly
• If Any Part of the Pipeline Fails, Stop the Pipeline
Pipeline
Manual
Extensive
Testing
Smoke
Testing
Build
Installers
CI 2
CI
1
CI 3
SCC
Pre GC

16. 11/8/17
14
Build Binaries
Build
Installers
Build VMs
Pipeline
Pre
SCC
Commit
& Test
Staged Automated
Testing
Asynchronous Stages
Manual
Deploy
Reproducible, Reliable &
Scalable Infrastructure
Build Binaries Build
Installers
Build VMs
Pre
SCC
Commit &
Test
Staged Automated Testing
Asynchronous Stages
Manual
Deploy
>600 Systems
>100
>400
>100

17. 11/8/17
15
Infrastructure as Code
Services
Virtual Machines
Resource Monitoring

18. 11/8/17
16
Why should an Operations
organization adopt CD practices?
• Easier to adjust to changing priorities and requests
• Faster turn around time on requests = Happy clients
• Higher confidence in release and more autonomy
• Less stress
• More efficient team
Benefits

19. 11/8/17
17
Thank you