JAX DevOps Blog

JAX DEVOPS BLOG

JAX DevOps, 3-6 April 2017
The Conference for Continuous Delivery, Microservices, Docker & Clouds

1 Mar 2017

Software development is not just about building stuff, over the better part of the last decade a global movement kicked in that realized this change in building and delivering software. In this post, JAX DevOps Speaker Kris Buytaert explains how software has only value when it is running in production.

Jax DevOps: In your talk’s intro you mention that “software has only value when it is running in production” and that people seem to forget that. What do you mean? Could you give us an example?

Kris Buytaert: A lot of software gets written, yet ends up never being used, or even deployed, some software just doesn’t run, other software doesn’t do what the people that ordered for it to be written wanted, and a lot of code ends up not working on the platform where it needs to be deployed. All of this is waste of time and effort, nobody likes to pay for these kind of efforts and nobody likes to spend weeks of effort on things that nobody uses. Agile and devops are here to solve that problem get everybody involved, from the users to the ops folks, everyone. The continuous feedback loop we create from dev, to ops, to users and back will not only improve the quality of software but it will also make sure that new efforts are spent in areas where everyone benefits, and not on some nifty feature the marketers dreamed of but which is impossible to scale or which no user really wants.

Agile and devops are here to solve that problem get everybody involved, from the users to the ops folks, everyone.

Jax DevOps: What can stand in the way of deploying and running software?

Kris: Mostly humans, more specifically managers, with no knowledge engaging in discussions they shouldn’t be involved in, blocking both developers and operations folks to do their work. A lot of the gap between devs and ops is created by organisations that put in place artificial procedures and ways of working that prevent collaboration. This causes developers to not know or understand the dependencies ops folks have and operations folks not be aware of what the developer is building and why she is building it in a suboptimal way

 

Jax DevOps: How can we fix that?

Kris: Quoting Adrian Cockroft “Get out of their way”. We need to tear down the wall between the different stakeholders in the software delivery process.

 

Jax DevOps: How about prevention? Are there steps that can prevent such an unfortunate scenario from happening?

Kris: Commnication, communication, communication.

 

Jax DevOps: Everybody learns from mistakes. What were your mistakes and what did you learn from them?

Kris: My biggest mistakes were to not focus enough on the organisational aspects of devops, technology can only do so much, but even with the perfect technology stack and huge levels of automation in place, if the organisation doesn’t change their practices, velocity won’t increase.

 

Jax DevOps: What should participants learn from your session?

Kris: The talk is actually full of technical reasons and solutions. But most of these reasons have lack of, or broken communication as the original root cause. The talk will help people detect these and solve them. It will also give a deeper insight in what Ops people need to do in order to get software deployed, which is something they probably haven’t communicated enough about.

 

Jax DevOps:  Please complete the following questions:

Dev and Ops work best together if … there’s no barriers in between.
The biggest obstacle for DevOps is … management.
What promotes employee satisfaction is … fun.
The biggest advantage of autonomously-working teams is … being able to take end to end responsability for a service and actually delivering on that.
It is important for a positive company culture to … allow failure.

 

JAX DevOps talks by Kris Buytaert:
Deploy Stuff, Run Stuff
Wed. 05 APR 2017,
16:00 – 16:50

Software development is not just about building stuff, over the better part of the last decade a global movement kicked in that realized this change in building and delivering software. Software has only value when it is running in production. Yet people seem to forget about that. This talk will teach you about a number of real life situations preventing deplooyment and running software and how to fix them.

Behind the Tracks

BUSINESS & COMPANY CULTURE
the process of becoming fully agile
CLOUD PLATFORMS
Cloud-based & native apps
DOCKER & KUBERNETES
Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos & Co
CONTINUOUS DELIVERY
Build, test and deploy agile
MICROSERVICES
Maximize development productivity
Business & Company Culture

Business & Company Culture

Cloud Platforms

Cloud Platforms

Docker & Kubernetes

Docker & Kubernetes

Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery

Microservices

Microservices

Monitoring & Diagnostics

Monitoring & Diagnostics