DevOps presentation for discussion at the first DFW Software Leaders Meeting at the Synerzip offices.

1. DevOps for CTOs
Software Leaders Breakfast
3-4-2014

2. My observations, experience,
research, thoughts
On
DevOps for SaaS CTOs

3. We want to talk, not listen – so this
is going to go fast…

4. Traditional development focus on
Functional Requirements
Features
UI
(and bugs)

5. Non-Functional Requirements
often ignored
Security, backup, high availability, failover, upgradeability, configuration
management, monitoring, deployment, test, feature flags
No time
(these really are features too)

6. And IT Ops has their own issues
Few resources and no automation
=
More of the same

7. Business Value = Features
Right?

8. Business Value
=
Anything which makes people gives
us more money
(Coda Hale)

9. Business Value happens when our
code runs, not when we write it
We don’t pay nearly as much
attention to code running as we do
to code writing

10. SaaS = Product
ALL of it
functional and non-functional
(hardware, software, API, monitors, logs, health checks,
configuration management, test data, security, scaling up/down,
failover, etc.)

11. Write ----> Run
(there’s a lot in between)

12. DevOps
To increase the flow of work
between Dev and Ops and build a
culture of continuous
improvement between the groups

13. Traditionally…
Dev
Ops
(Write) (Deploy)
What happens when it doesn’t
run?

15. More and more…
Dev
Dev
(Functional) (Non-Functional)
Using code and automation

16. Infrastructure as Code
Versioned
Automated
Repeatable
(idea started before cloud but is best implemented in
cloud)

17. • 2013 DevOps Survey by Puppet Labs
• DevOps = Collaboration between Development and Operations
teams to achieve a common business goal
• 63% using DevOps practices, a 26% increase over 2011
• Ship code 30x more frequently with lead times of a few minutes
• 50% fewer failures with the ability to recover 12x faster
• 89% use version control – for infrastructure
• 82% use automated code deployment
• Blockers to adoption – not understood, no management/team
buy in
• DevOps job postings are skyrocketing
• Skills – Coding/Scripting, tools (*)

18. Key Indicators…
Increase Deploy Frequency
Decrease Change Lead Time
Decrease Change Failure Rate
Decrease Mean Time To Recover
With Version Control and Automated Deployment

19. There’s just one box
and it is bigger than most think
All environments
All code
One Team

20. Environments:
• Dev
• QA
• Staging
• Production
Plus:
• Boundary
• New Relic
• White Hat
• Pingdom
• PagerDuty
• Etc.
(Clogeny.com)

21. My Recent Experience…
Worked on Dev/Agile first
Stabilized Infrastructure
Tried to turn ops people in to DevOps people, didn’t work
Wasted a LOT of time
Searched LinkedIn for DevOps and started contacting
They’re all employed and busy and not looking for jobs
Found one and recruited hard
Hired one leader and he started recruiting more

22. My Recent Experience…
We had very early automation attempts and some alerts but we
had SO far to go
No automation, metrics, common logs – flying blind
It was humbling
Started with New Relic, Boundary, Pager Duty, Pingdom
Started the move to AWS
Incredible pressure to return to bad behaviors
Painful discussions – “Warranty Denied”

23. My Recent Experience…
It’s very hard to start this in a mature software organization
Very intrusive into the Dev culture (testing, instrumentation,
logging, automated builds, etc. – all non-functional)
Complete change to the Ops culture (shift focus away from
touching hardware, and fixing things by hand, to writing code)
Test/Stage/Prod must match in every way – including HA
Database is just plain hard in this stuff (last frontier)
I’d say give a year at the very least and be prepared to lose
people

24. Discussion
Burke Autrey
Burke@AutreyMail.com
972-897-5897
SoftwareTeam6
Leadership for Software Companies
Strategy
Product Lifecycle
DevOps
Product Management
Security and Compliance
Due Diligence