1. How to choose tools for DevOps and Continuous Delivery
Matthew Skelton, Skelton Thatcher Consulting
DevOps Manchester meetupgroup, 2ndSeptember 2014, Manchester, UK
#devopsmanc#twuknorth

2. Collaboration
Learning
Singleton tools
Conway’s Law

3. Matthew Skelton
•15 years building & operating software systems
•Cybernetics + Neuroscience
•control engineering
•psychology
•‘network’ interactions
@matthewpskelton

4. PIPELINE Conference
London Continuous Delivery meetupgroup (#londoncd)

5. Help orgs to adopt and sustain good engineering practices
Interim CTO/Head of X, tech strategy, architecture, workshops, delivery

6. Recent clients
•Tourism
•Betting & gambling
•Travel booking
•Financial data & reporting
•Healthcare

7. Common themes
•Online since ~1999
•Successful in their sector
•Large, central core database(s)
•Non-aligned goals
•Need to adopt DevOps and Continuous Delivery

8. Common needs
•Technology selection ticklists
•Team interactions
•Collaboration opportunities
•Tools as catalysts

10. Continuous Delivery
•A scientific approach to changing software systems (Dave Farley)
•Regular, rapid, repeatable, reliable changes

11. Continuous Delivery
•Quality
•Safety
•Reliability
•Psychology
•Effectiveness

13. DevOps
“Highly effective, daily collaboration between software developers and IT operations people to produce relevant, working systems” *
*also QA/Testing, IT Service Desk, Programme Management, Commercial, Marketing, etc.

14. Not DevOps
“Automation”
“Build & Release”
“Infrastructure Development”
“System Administration”

16. Collaboration

17. 1. Version Control

24. 2. Deployment Pipeline

25. A large online retailer
•Travel sector
•Since ~1999
•UK market
•‘Non-core’ applications

26. Challenges were:
•Limited Git skills in Service team
•Manual deployments
•‘Snowflake’ servers
•No CI
•Risks: security, automation, etc

27. http://bit.ly/thetrainline-weekly-deploy

28. What we did
•Built a walking skeleton pipeline
•Modelled security roles and stages
•Included manual steps (at first)
•Walked people through steps
•Finally: opened firewall so everyone could see the UI

29. Results
•Security: happy
•Service team: relieved (& happy)
•Developers: won over (& happy)
•Business: surprised (& happy)

30. 3. Log Aggregation

31. LogStash
•ElasticSearch+ LogStash+ Kibana
•ELK
•In Production, Pre-Prod, Test
•On developer machines!!!

32. http://rashidkpc.github.io/Kibana/images/screenshots/searchss.png

33. Collaboration & tool choice
Value collaboration as a key criterion
Orthogonal to main purpose (?)
“How does [the use of] this tool help people to collaborate?”

34. Learning

39. Learning & tool choice
Bring people with you
Appreciate current skills
Prefer achievable gains now
Avoid fear of too-scary tools

40. Singleton tools
(or the ‘Prize Bull’ approach)

42. Singleton tools
•Special database server
•Costly log aggregation
•Costly monitoring
•Server configuration

43. http://www.walpapershddownload.com/highland-cattle-wallpapers/

44. “Better features”?
Optimise globally across the teams that need to collaborate

45. Singleton tool
Breaks feedback (learning) loop from Production
Makes CI/CD more difficult
Underestimates value of collaboration and learning

46. Conway’s Law

47. Mel Conway, 1968
“organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations”
http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html

49. DevOps Topologies

50. DevOps Topologies

51. DevOps Topologies

52. DevOps Topologies

53. Conway & Tool Choice
See the organisation as a system
Separate tools for separate teams
Shared tools for collaborative teams
http://bit.ly/DevOpsTopologies

54. Conway’s Law
•Allan Kelly -@allankellynet
•https://vimeo.com/channels/londoncd

56. How to choose tools for DevOps
Value collaboration aspects
Avoid a learning mountain: evolve tooling
Avoid Production-only tools
Consider Conway’s Law
(this list is incomplete!)

57. Further reading
HighOps Operability eBook
bit.ly/OperabilityEbook
Build Quality In
buildqualityin.com

58. Thank you
matthewskelton.net / @matthewpskelton
skeltonthatcher.com
HT: @Squire_Matt, @alan_parkinson