Strangers deploying microservices

I’ll admit I was skeptical when the GitHub team told us about the interactive sandbox sessions at GitHub Universe. If I’m doing a live demo I have backup screenshots or recordings to show how things should have worked, but there is nowhere to hide in a room of 50 strangers each with their own laptop and the expectation to experience your platform first hand.

Still, the offer was too good to pass up, so we hatched a plan to show how Octopus can quickly create deployment pipelines to onboard new teams and then have the attendees create their own individual pipelines using the Copilot extension.

The challenge of getting a room full of attendees to be productive in Octopus in 10 minutes is similar to the challenge of on-boarding new DevOps teams for large enterprises. In both cases it is critical to get people productive with a minimum amount of time and effort. When DevOps leaders ask us about developer experience, they are mostly trying to gauge how disruptive it will be to implement a new platform across thousands of developers who may or may not be interested in learning yet-another-devops-platform.

An underrated aspect of chat based interfaces is that they are incredibly easy to get started with. Our demo had a simple checklist of prompts for attendees to paste into the Copilot chat window with a few customizations for things like project names:

The results speak for themselves: out of a room of 50 or so attendees, we had 36 new projects created, and 25 of them deployed to the first environment:

We’ve always considered the first deployment in Octopus to be the point where people reach “activation”. This is where they see the value of the platform and are more likely to be long term users. With Copilot, we reached the activation point for half the session attendees in 10 minutes. This is amazing considering most of the attendees had never used Octopus before.

This shows the impact of reducing cognitive load. While chat based interfaces are unlikely to replicate the nuance of traditional user interfaces, they are incredible for executing common tasks, and even more powerful when your tools share a common chat window. Seeing a room full of strangers deploy their first microservice via their own personal pipeline in 10 minutes is proof that chat based interfaces have a critical role to play in DevEx.

A big thank you to all those who attended our sessions at GitHub Universe – we look forward to catching you all next year!