CONTINUOUS DELIVERY FOR US ALL

Diabol Continuous Delivery, DevOps

2016-01-20 TONNI HULT 

During the last years I have taken a great interest in Continuous Delivery, or CD, and DevOps because the possibilities they give are very tempting, like:

  • releasing tested and tracable code to production for example an hour after check-in, all without any drama or escalation involved
  • giving the business side the control over when a function is installed or activated in production
  • bringing down organizational boundries, working more collaboratively and letting the teams get more responsibility and control over their systems and their situation
  • decreasing the amount of meetings and manual work that is being done

    • My CD interest grew to the point that I wanted to work more focused with this area so I started looking for a new job but when scanning the market I ran into a problem. If you do a search for work in Sweden within CD, and look at the knowledge requested, it is often not C#, MSBuild, TFS and Windows Server they are looking for and most of my background, knowledge and work experience is within that stack. This also concurred with my former experience because looking at other companies that are considered in the forefront as Google, Netflix, Amazon and Spotify they do not have their base in Microsoft technology.

    At my former workplace, where we mainly used Microsoft products, we were a few driving forces who promoted and educated people in CD and also tried to implement it via a pilot project. Working with this project we never felt that Microsoft technology made it impossible (or even hard) to implement a CD way of working as it works regardless of your underlying technology. So why are Microsoft users not so good at being in the front, or at least not showing it, because CD is there and is possible to achieve with some hard work. My reflection over why is that Microsoft users (generally)

  • are more accustomed to using Microsoft technology and do not look around for what can complete or improve their situation. Linux and Java users are for example more used to finding and using products that solve more specific problems
  • don’t think that other products can be added in a smooth way to their environment and way of working
  • don’t have the same drive around technology as for example Linux and Java users, a drive they also are eager to show
  • can be a little content and don’t question their situation, or they see the problems but neglect to respond to them

    • This is something I want to change so more Microsoft based companies are shown in the “forefront” because all companies with IT, regardless of their choice of technology, have great benefits to gain from CD. Puppet Labs yearly conduct a “State Of DevOps” survey* to see how DevOps and CD is accepted in the world of it** and what difference, if any, that this makes. If you look at the result from the survey the results are very clear (https://puppetlabs.com/sites/default/files/2015-state-of-devops-report.pdf):

  • High performing IT organizations release code 30 times more frequent with 200 times shorter leadtime. They also have 60 times less “failures” and recover 168 times faster
  • Lean management and continuous delivery practices create the conditions for delivering value faster, sustainably
  • An environment with freedom and responsibility where it invests in the people and for example automation of releases give a lot not only to the employees but also to the organization
  • Being high performing is (under some conditions) achievable whether you work with greenfield, brownfield or legacy systems. If you don’t have the conditions right now that is something to work towards
  • To help you on your journey towards an effective, reliable and frequent delivery Diabol has developed a CD Maturity Model (http://www.infoq.com/articles/Continuous-Delivery-Maturity-Model) and this you can use to evaluate your current situation and see what abilities you need to evolve in order to be a high performing it-organization. And to be called high performing you need to be in at least an Advanced level in all dimensions, with a few exceptions that are motivated by your organizations circumstances. But remember that for every step on the model that you take you have great benefits and improvements to gain.

    • So if you work at a company which releases every 1, 3 or 6 months where every release is a minor or major project, how would it feel if you instead could release the code after every sprint, every week or even every hour without so much as a raised eyebrow? How would it be to know exactly what code is installed in each environment and have new code installed right after check-in? How about knowing how an environment is configured and also know the last time it was changed and why? This is all possible so let us at Diabol help you get there and you are of course welcome regardless of your choice in technology.

    *If you would like to know more about the report from Puppet Labs and how it is made I can recommend reading http://itrevolution.com/the-science-behind-the-2013-puppet-labs-devops-survey-of-practice/

    **I don’t mean that CD and DevOps are the same but this can be the topic of another blog post. They though have a lot in common and both are mentioned by Puppet Labs