SpringOne live blog – Crossing the CI/CD/DevOps Chasm

Crossing the CI/CD/DevOps Chasm
Speaker: Miranda LeBlanc (Liberty Mutual)

For more posts from Spring One 2017, see the Spring One blog table of contents

Goals

  • Cloud native enterprise – continuous delivery of valuable software
  • Embrace DevOps – culture of trust, safety and confidence
  • Agile
  • Microservices architecture

Working with services/teams

  • Operate in an open source fashion
  • Can submit pull requests to other teams
  • Liberty CloudForge – internal tooling team to support business facing teams.

Security

  • Need to protect medical and financial data
  • Build safety, security and compliance into pipeline

Goals vs Reality

  • Developers focused on own team/business units.
  • Not ready to do open source like development.
  • Not ready to look at chasm let alone cross it.

Approach

  • Started experimenting with tools and standing up CI.
  • Then progressed to static analysis/code review.
  • Then DevOps and automated deployments
  • Then PaaS
  • Then to Prod in 5 minutes

MVP

  • Focus on MVP on every feature/story
  • Minimal feature is a proof of concept
  • Want MVP that will delight customers

Challenges

  • Removing features that aren’t delivering value (or not delivering value anymore)
  • Growth – going from 10-50 people. Everyone can’t know everything.

Lessons Learned

  • CI/CD requires real software engineering skill – learning Maven/Gradle, automated testing, etc.
  • Define key metrics up front and use them – ex: released a bug to prod because focused on unit test coverage
  • Culture and behaviors matter – ex: get whole team on board with new wait of thinking. Want to avoid asking what date trying to hit. Roadmaps are for conversations not commitments.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *