Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Continuous Delivery in London – recent events and new Meetup group

Posted on October 14, 2012October 15, 2012 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

The last few months in London have seen a surge in interest in Continuous Delivery by companies wanting to speed up delivery of their web-based software systems. See below for a summary of the events I have been fortunate to be involved with (I know there are many more); if you’re interested in Continuous Delivery and you’re in or close to London, then join the London Continuous Delivery meetup group (#londoncd) and let’s share our experience.

(logo by @DaveNolan!)

James Betteley: Continuous Delivery using Maven

James Betteley gave a useful talk at BCS on how he used Maven in a Continuous Delivery context alongside Artifactory, Nexus and Sonar. James blogged about using Maven for Continuous Delivery back in February 2012: well worth a read, even if you’re not using the Java+Maven stack.

AKQA

In July, Christopher Marsh of AKQA talked about his company’s success with Continuous Delivery on a London-based project for a large client organisation. They used GO from ThoughtWorks Studios for implementing the deployment pipeline.

7digital

I went to the London offices 7digital for a Devs In The ‘Ditch session last week, where Chris O’Dell explained how they have moved from painful, irregular releases with tightly-coupled code to frequent small releases and a service-oriented approach. The transformation took two years, and they now restrict deployable units to about a day’s worth of work to make deployment easier. GOOS co-author Steve Freeman also gave a useful talk on full-system testing, which is crucial to get right in a Continuous Delivery context.

ThoughtWorks Studios GO 12.3

The ThoughtWorks Studios product team have changed the pricing model with the 12.3 version of their agile release management tool GO: the free Community edition how has feature parity with the pay-for editions, including previously enterprise-y only features such as LDAP and Environments. This means that small teams can make full use of the excellent deployment pipeline features of GO without the price tag. I was always a bit reluctant to recommend using GO before now because the free version was feature-limited, but with all features now available in all editions, I have to say that for modelling and implementing deployment pipelines, there is other no tool which comes close to GO.

WebPerfDays EU 2012

I was fortunate to be able to present at WebPerfDays EU 2012 on how build and deployment shapes software architecture at thetrainline.com [slides] along with Andie and Oddur from CCPGames. Three of the many really excellent discussions that came up were:

Why you should design your pipelines up front [more on this from me soon…]
How to get real ownership of software (e.g. service/product teams, devs on call, etc.)
Jenkins vs TravisCI vs TW GO for deployment pipeline automation

In the end, we had to be ‘evicted’ from the room; we could have gone on discussing for another hour! Apparently, one major UK publisher had nearly 10 staff in the session, and rated it the best session in WebPerfDays. It was so great to be among such brilliant minds and conversions, which led me to…

A London Continuous Delivery meetup group

Based on conversations and discussions at At WebPerfDays it was clear that a London-based meetup group centered on Continuous Delivery would be interesting for quite a few people and organisations.

A few of us agreed to get things off the ground, and we’re now on Meetup.com at London Continuous Delivery (http://www.meetup.com/London-Continuous-Delivery/) and on Twitter with #londoncd. Any help, donations, perks, etc. are very welcome.

Moving a News Website to a Different Content Management System

Posted on July 17, 2012July 18, 2012 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

How does a small but nationally visible non-profit organisation go about moving their news-focused website to a different content management system? A good friend of mine works for a non-profit news organisation and asked me this question recently, so I put together some very brief notes based on some of the website migrations I have done over the last few years for similar organisations (a charity, an industry trade body, and a specialist news publisher).

moving books

The client being a small non-profit organisation constrains the solution to license-free (non-commercial) content management system (CMS), because at an industry standard of around $20k and upwards, the license costs for commercial CMS products tend to be out of the range of small non-profit budgets.

There are therefore five key things to consider for migrating an existing news-focused website for a non-profit organisation to a new CMS:

What open-source technology should you use?
To what extent should you customise the technology and how?
What is a reasonable cost – one-off and ongoing support?
Who should undertake the implementation?
Where should the site be hosted?

There are plenty of other problems to solve once the initial decisions have been taken, but for a simple, news-focused website, with content only in English, we don’t need to worry about managing translations or dealing with transactional workflows. So what’s next?

Continue reading Moving a News Website to a Different Content Management System

Avoiding Legacy with Deployment Automation and Infrastructure-as-Code

Posted on June 19, 2012September 28, 2020 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Learning from ‘Working Effectively with Legacy Code’ by Michael C. Feathers

Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael C. Feathers is a classic software development text. Not only is it still completely relevant when working with code, seven years after it was published, but also the approaches it advocates at the source code level are becoming essential to apply at the component and system integration levels too as our software systems become more complicated and polyglot, and we learn to fully automate our deployments and treat our infrastructure as code.

Book cover: Working Effectively with Legacy Code

For an overview of the book itself, read my review of ‘Legacy Code’ on Amazon.co.uk. I describe the different sections and how each is useful in a particular context. The rest of this article will focus on other aspects of Legacy Code, particularly the ‘why’ of changing code, and the implications for Continuous Delivery, infrastructure-as-code, and deployment automation.

Continue reading Avoiding Legacy with Deployment Automation and Infrastructure-as-Code

Event-Sourced Architectures by Martin Thompson at QConLondon 2012

Posted on May 18, 2012May 18, 2012 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Software performance guru Martin Thompson (@mjpt777) gave an illuminating talk on event-sourced architectures, and why event-driven, state-machine designs are the way forward for complex, multi-path software systems (“Event Sourced Architectures and what we have forgotten about High-Availability”, [slides: 700KB PDF]).