Devops on the edge V2

DevOps on the edge - a case study

Future

A large retailer

FTSE 100

Incentivisation

A lot of employees > 160K

Many have long service > 15 years

Very large IT department > 800 people

Recruitment - devops graduate scheme

1000s of stores - some large some small

1000s of suppliers

Millions of customers and millions of transactions every week

OPEX and CAPEX

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mikedilworth

Conversations on transformation

mjd@computer.org

Mike Dilworth

http://www.e-nspect.com

IT transformation

Why change?

• Long lead times for new services

• Abandoned projects

• Large upfront capital costs

• Sluggish release cadences

• Too many supplier dependencies

• Need to compete with the nimblest players in a low-margin market

On the edge

• Sensu

• ELK/Splunk

• NewRelic/AppDynamics

• Cloudwatch

• Grafana

Monitoring

• Large internal developer community - new type of end user

• Using open source technologies

• Access to a wide variety of Internet sites and SaaS

• Move from MS Windows to Macs

• Local admin rights to install software

• Creation of new networks with more permissive access - move from white listing to black listing

Key transformation objectives

Tools for the job

• GO CD

• Jenkins

• Appveyor

Pipelines

• Large investment in private cloud strategy.

• Highly complex, multi-vendor, multi-year waterfall driven project.

• Original plan to replicate traditional silo IT approach

• Could not support DevOps ways of working

• Could not change project direction fast enough to meet demand of new projects

• Could not compete with public cloud providers

• Resolution - public cloud first strategy adopted with private cloud investment focused on migrating legacy.

3 Technical Pillars of DevOps

Outsource what you can't add value to

Infrastructure

• Terraform

• Vagrant

• Packer

• Docker

• Kubernetes

• Chef

• Ansible

Infrastructure

DevOps

In house things which you can add value to, through innovation or by doing them better than a supplier

• Tools for the job

• Infrastructure

• Tech stacks

Use utility computing

Build skills and competencies

Technology

Use autonomous self-contained teams which are able to deliver end to end

Culture

Focus on small incremental changes with fast feedback loops

Global thinking

Customer focused

Communications

Practice

Attracting talent

Identifying talent

Cultural misalignment

Support tools

Velocity of recruitment

Permanent and contractors

People

Location / Infra Dev home

Can I push that fix NOW while everyone is in the office?

Product Owner

• Here to help with infrastructure development, not 'DevOps engineers'

• Deliver services and platforms to the agile teams so they can do DevOps

• To Configure, Build, Deploy, Monitor, 24/7, At Scale, without fuss

Infrastructure Developers

Process

• Not the responsibility of one team

• It is how we think as a company

• How we communicate and work together

• How we build and consume technology

DevOps is a culture, not a Role

Can I troubleshoot from the logs?

Developer

• Can we do zero downtime deployments?

• Can we install and configure without a mouse

Attracting talent

Technical Designer

• Meetups - DevOps Exchange, Women who Go, etc.

• Sponsor events - Kubecon

• Speak at events - like this one!

• Network - suppliers, vendors, personal contacts

• Manage suppliers

• Does that change improve usability?

• Are we selling more stuff?

UX and Digital

Identifying talent

• Working closely with resourcing partners (HR)

• Added agencies to the PSL

• Improved role description documents

• Hiring process, telephone, tech test, face 2 face

• Dedicate resources to do this (1 day per week)

Inception - Discovery - Engineering

Change

Service transition

Support

Technology