Spring Connect Charlotte Developer Nirvana Speaker: Jim Hopkins

1. Developer Nirvana
Jim Hopkins, Container Practice Manager, WWT

2. FUN FACT:
AVID OUTDOORSMAN AND STARTED THE WWT HOUR
OF CODE
BACKGROUND:
TRADITIONAL IT BACKGROUND (COMPUTE &
NETWORKS)
5 YEARS AT WWT
SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR
DELIVERY ENGINEER (DEVOPS PRACTITIONER)
DEVOPS CONSULTANT
CONTACT:
JIM.HOPKINS@WWT.COM
GL/GH/LINKEDIN - JIMHOPKINSJR
JIM HOPKINS
CONTAINER PLATFORM PRACTICE MANAGER

3. What is Nirvana
• Perfect peace, happiness
• Enlightenment
• Transcending the cycle of reincarnation
• Bliss

5. https://xkcd.com/888/

6. What Nirvana IS NOT
• Pain
• Suffering
• Loathing

8. Nirvana in Information Technology
• Work / Life balance
• Reduction of Toil
• Workplace joy
• Team development
• Blameless Learning

9. DevOps Excellence
DevOps is the combination of people, process and technology to enable
the continuous delivery of value.
DevOps Is:DevOps is Not:
• A way of working
• A culture
• A journey of continuous
improvement
• An extension of agile
methodology
• A role
• A separate team
• A tool or suite of tools
• Something that can be
purchased in units

10. A P P L I C A T I O N
S E R V I C E S
Culture
• Eliminate blame
• Build high levels of trust between
peers, departments, etc.
• Operate with empathy
• Organize work in cross-functional
teams
• Intimate collaboration with customer
(Q: Who is your customer?)
• Break down silos of knowledge
(Q: What do you need to do to communicate with a peer in
another department?)
Culture consists of connections,
not of separations: to specialize is
to isolate.
- Carlos Fuentes, Author

11. A P P L I C A T I O N
S E R V I C E S
Automation
• Save humans from repetitive tasks
• Consistency of processes
• Create confidence in the system
• Disruptions of Automation
• Automating Deployments
• Where and When to Automate
• Can you Automate too far?
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his
limbs but the push-button finger.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

12. A P P L I C A T I O N
S E R V I C E S
Lean
• Rapid prototyping
• Experimentation
• Reducing waste
• Building MVP versus a complete
solution
• Vertically slicing workContinuous improvement is better
than delayed perfection.
- Mark Twain

13. A P P L I C A T I O N
S E R V I C E S
Measurement
• How do you know you’re improving
without measuring?
• Types of Performance: People,
Product, Operations
• Measuring isn’t just good enough –
what do you do with the metrics?
• Four Key Metrics of Effective
DevOps
You can’t manage what you
don’t measure.
- Peter Drucker, Founder of Modern Management

14. A P P L I C A T I O N
S E R V I C E S
Sharing
• Transferring knowledge
• Eliminate silos
• Whole system improvements through
shared localizes successes
• How to promote and incentivize sharing and
consuming?
• Create platforms for disseminating
information company-wide
• Leaders: Allow for the time to share; sharing
takes time and effort
• Increase investment in decisions and
outcomes
• Hold blameless retrospectives
Knowledge is a weapon. I intend
to be formidably armed.
- Terry Goodkind, American Author

15. 4 Key Metrics
Software delivery performance
• Deploy Frequency (when business demands)
• Lead Time for Changes
• Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)
• Change Fail Rate

16. High PerformingTeams
More agile
46x
More frequent
code deployments
Difference between multiple times a day
and once a week or less
2555x
Faster lead time
from commit to deploy
Difference between less than an hour and
more than a week

17. High PerformingTeams
More reliable
2406x
Faster time to recover
from downtime
High performers recover in less than an
hour instead of weeks
7x
Less likely that changes
will fail
High performers changes fail 0-15% of the
time, compared to 46-60% of the time

18. Software Delivery Performance
Software Delivery Performance is
comprised of throughput and stability,
and both are possible without tradeoffs

19. A P P L I C A T I O N
S E R V I C E S
The FirstWay: Flow
(Systems Thinking)
A bad system will beat a good
person every time.
- W. Edwards Deming

20. A P P L I C A T I O N
S E R V I C E S
The SecondWay: Feedback
How do you know what you’ve done is right?
The single biggest problem in
communication is the illusion that
it has taken place.
- George Bernard Shaw, Playwright

21. A P P L I C A T I O N
S E R V I C E S
TheThirdWay: Experimentation
Creating a culture that fosters continual experimentation,
taking risks and learning from failure
Science, my boy, is made up of
mistakes, but they are mistakes which it
is useful to make, because they lead
little by little to the truth.
- Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

22. DevOps Journey at WWT

23. Test all the things!

24. 5TH ITERATION

26. Demo

27. Demo:Tools andTech on Display
A CI/CD pipeline composed of Infrastructure-as-Code tools.
Tool Role
Packer Automate creation of base OS image.
Terraform Automate creation of VMs based on standard OS image.
Ansible Automate configuration of VMs to suit application needs.
Molecule Automate testing of Ansible playbooks.
GitLab CI Automate execution of build, test, deploy pipeline.

28. Demo: Context
Most pipelines deploy applications. This deploys infrastructure.
Control Plane
Environment
Dev Environment
Here, we automate deployment of the Control Plane Environment.
Ops
Manager
jump box
bosh
Concourse
GitLab CI
Automation
PKS
Ops
Manager
bosh
k8sk8sk8sk8s
k8sk8sk8sk8s
...
Production Environment
Ops
Manager
PKS
bosh k8sk8sk8sk8s
k8sk8sk8sk8s
k8sk8sk8sk8s ...k8sk8sk8sk8s
k8sk8sk8sk8s
k8sk8sk8sk8s
ConcourseConcourse
Workers
Concourse
Workers

29. Demo: Assumptions
1. NSX-T is installed, configured, managed externally.
2. Network segments and NAT rules for the control plane are
managed separately.
3. DNS records are managed separately.
4. IP address space is managed separately.
These are not required for all pipelines, but they are true here
and could also be true in a real environment.