The devops laboratory - 1 year later

Editor's Notes

• #3 These is me and my passions.
• #4 In the last 4 and half year I've been working for REA. We operate heavy traffic sites around the world. Some of the things that make REA special are: - Innovation - Though leadership in areas like agile, lean and devops The only constant is change, always looking to improve.
• #6 This talk is about the different experiments we've run to try to create a devops culture in REA. As probably Nigel could explain better: “Complex systems are complex” and organizations like REA are complex in many dimensions: business, engineering, IT systems, etc... The approach Change something and observe. Be brave. Repeat.
• #7 Delviery vs Site Operations
• #8 Ops: - To modify the code - To help understand how the application works Devs: - To help us deploy to prod - To help us with some non functional requirements
• #9 The night is dark and full of incidents.
• #10 Days since a full night sleep counter 3-4 alerts per night
• #11 Happy engineer getting off pager.
• #12 Ops had to understand and troubleshoot a massively large complex set of systems Storage/Networks/Systems/Apps/Monitoring/Data/Security etc... That made hiring difficult because: Heroes don't scale
• #14 Short temporal placements of engineers in a different functional area. Normally went for a few weeks. Allocated capacity Working closer to where the action is
• #15 Knowledge of full stack You would never stop learning Handovers and rump up for a new area difficult Still there were conflicting priorities Alerts and incidents still been managed by the central team
• #16 Meet ADO, one of our first Devs to be fully knighted by the SiteOps team Ops in Delivery Devs in Site Ops I am going to fit there?
• #18 As many companies have done Create a centralize team to drive automation, continuous delivery, cloud adoption, etc... PROBLEMS: Painful manual deployments QA blessing to go to prod Coordination wall 1 staging fits all
• #19 The approach Centralized team Build tools ( #cloud + #chef + #git ) Solution that fits all needs Influence teams to adoption
• #20 This is a simplified version of an E2E environment. One of the achievements of the Gandalf team that allowed us for a long time to have better opportunities for developing and testing changes that affected multiple components.
• #21 Just an example of some of the tech challenges the team was going through as they tried to provide stable infrastructure for EVERYONE.
• #22 Send your champions to contaminate other areas with their passion
• #23 Longer term allocations to a team Ops still reported/belonged to the SiteOps team
• #24 Different approach - Champions in each team to build the needed capabilities: automation, monitoring, performance Some pluses Priorities dictated by your function area Engagement with the team Better understanding of pain points Early input in the project
• #25 Longer term allocations to a team Ops still reported/belonged to the SiteOps team
• #27 Example of optimization from within a team instead of tackling the full-company problem.
• #28 The Autobots team was part of one of the Delivery areas and was focused on automating some parts of their delivery process.
• #29 They mianaged to automate some really compex processes: - Schemabot: Database schema changes in an automated maner. - Deploybot: Managed the deployment. One of its components, the netscaler gem, was afterward used by multiple teams. The idea of copying from the open source model and having teams looking at what other teams have come up with has repeated over time becoming one of the most successful patterns at REA.
• #31 Different business areas highly independent Develop + Operation A very lean layer of Global Infrastructure to support
• #32 Thing layers of shared services and vendor mgmt The principle was to impulse TMI: Team Managed Infrastructure. Cloud – Many accounts Cons: Does everybody needs to know about infrastructure/netoworks/etc...?
• #33 Negative Priorities dictated by your business area New Silos Lost sense of community Postivie Focus - Get Shit Done Engagement with the team +++ Input into the roadmap
• #34 We give autonomy to the business areas to chose the best tools/practices for their areas. They will have to support and maintain what they create which drives the Accountability.
• #35 Can you spot the Ops engineer? Devs step up (Pager, deployments, metrics, performance, etc...) Day pager going to devs Escalate if needed after troubleshooting Proxy knowledge Pick up BAU Deploy something that hasn't been deployed
• #36 Tom our ops engineer can focus in general improvements of operations like: Exploring a new CDN Regresion testing in Operations Automating Security patches Etc... If the problem was beyond the knowledge of the engineers they can escalate the problem to the Ops representative and the good thing is that they will cache the knowledge.
• #37 The role of the ops in LoBs has evolved: Their role (boost operations capacity in their area) Enable previously disabled people Early input into the projects
• #38 Different business areas highly independent Develop + Operation A very lean layer of Global Infrastructure to support
• #39 War room becomes the exception. For example this all hands on deck collaboration to tackle Hearbleed as soon as possible.
• #41 2 challenges so far: - We need to increase our Ops capability across the organisation - We need to minimise the walls of the new Silos.
• #42 What are guilds? - Communities of interest around different topics - Opt in model - They are horizontal
• #44 The previous model was quite successful but as we can see as we became faster the business areas tried to run more streams in parallel but the Ops capability sometimes wasn't correctly readjusted...
• #45 How many ops are too many ops? With areas running so many concurrent projects Push to regroup again But how is this different? Previous investments paying off. Devs++ Focus in areas that can boost the full group
• #46 Sometimes called Devops (arrrgggggg) or BAU teams.
• #47 Focus: go fast from idea to prod Examples: MaD walking scheleton, Group Delivery Engineering Danger: BAU and operations brought back to this group undoing the previous beneficts
• #48 Night pager improved over time. And finally we had our first grad on Pager. Kudos to Angus.
• #50 Different business areas highly independent Develop + Operation A very lean layer of Global Infrastructure to support
• #51 Security as consultants/coaches/experts Teams are accountable for security Lean technique: A3s (find out american sizes) Story telling (PIC) A3s
• #52 Different business areas highly independent Develop + Operation A very lean layer of Global Infrastructure to support
• #63 This experiments presented are just examples of what we have tried at some point of time. They had different level of success and the results are based on the state of our own business and our own journey. Run your own experiments. Try new things. Monitor the results.