DevOps for Everyone Meetup - 3rd March 2020

Here we are, the full write-up to our inaugural DevOps for Everyone meetup. Want to extend a thank you to our 2 fantastic guest speakers, both with very different topics and approaches to DevOps.

Let’s jump in…

First up was Paul Grand; a senior developer in his own right and who’s now a Lead Engineer at Haymarket Media Group – the award-winning specialist content for international audiences.

Paul started out by stating the point with not just DevOps, but development overall is to be continuously delivering new features… all … the … time ... don’t make things slower over time.

He then went on to iterate the importance of performance regression testing and why we need it, something that the group strongly agreed with.

So, why do we need it?

• You’re always pressed to deliver new functionality quickly, part of DevOps is convincing people to build solid foundations and to deliver faster and more frequently.

As this was an interactive session we had questions coming thick and fast, one put forward was when do you need to produce new software? Obviously automation plays a big part in creating new software and being able to replicate that down the line as and when.

Paul then went on to talk about what should be tested –

• Test isolation
• Test on the load

Next up Paul ran a basic scripting demo where he showed us when to test, how to test and what to measure with scenarios. Now while this might have gone ever so slightly above my head, the crowd grasped his tech knowledge and what he showed was GitHub actions and running NodeJS apps to check the response time against a static benchmark.

The Q&A at the end of Paul’s presentation brought some interesting debate; we discussed how you’d define what is 'good' and whether it’s worth putting the effort in to make it better. Again performance testing was brought up but so was the point about making small, incremental changes to continuously tinker with the software until you find small improvements. The smaller the SW the smaller the amount of bugs you'll encounter - so create small pools of software throughout the business.

We took a short break, ate some more pizza and grabbed ourselves another beer before Giles Hinchcliff stepped up to the oche.

Giles is a senior engineer who was an early adopter of Kubernetes, his knowledge of DevOps and the security needed to protect systems is second to none. Giles works as a Principal Consultant for Contino; the Global Enterprise DevOps, Data and Cloud Transformation Consultancy.

Giles began his talk by discussing why we do DevOps and why it often goes wrong – a huge figure is estimated to be spent on digital transformation; $2.3 trillion to be exact, so to be able to have a release pipeline which would see this money spent wisely it’s important that all the cogs in the machine bring the timeline down to a productive 2 week cycle. It creates a massive bottleneck if the strategy takes 9 months to be decided upon and passed down to finance, who then take 3 months to decide how the budget is spent, and then research has the concept and it takes them another 1 month to pass on … you get the point. By the time Dev and Ops get to work the strategy seems age old.

So, what do we do about this? We manage the chaos – you enable the ‘doers’ to come up with strategy. The doers are the ones implementing the strategy so why not give them the autonomy to create the thing they’re going to be implementing?

It’s also important not to have too many teams over a certain number – now what that magic number is, is anyone’s guess but as a group we seemed to agree on having no more than 7 if you really want your team to be agile and functional.

Transparency, empowerment, nurture and vision were all discussed. Keeping in mind the need for creating a happy workforce.

By closing out the meetup I asked the group about the differences in AWS vs Azure vs GCP and how a company decides which one to use.

Happy to say I received a lot of feedback and we had a discussion about the many (many) factors that affect this decision.

Thanks for joining me on this journey and I will keep you all posted on the next event soon!