Notes on ‘team responsibilities in cloud-native operations’ (Pete Mounce)

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Summary:  Pete Mounce (@petemounce) from Just Eat gave a compelling talk at the London Continuous Delivery meetup group on ‘team responsibilities in cloud-native operations’. I found the talk hugely engaging, with loads of detail applicable to many organisations. Here are my notes from the meetup.

I captured my notes as slides:

Update: the video of Pete’s talk is here on Vimeo:

Pete Mounce video frame

There were several specific points made by Pete that were interesting for me:

Continue reading Notes on ‘team responsibilities in cloud-native operations’ (Pete Mounce)

Roundup: Patterns for Performance and Operability

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Patterns for Performance and OperabilityI recently posted a review of Patterns for Performance and Operability by Ford et al on the SoftwareOperability website. I think that this book is exceptionally useful in its treatment of both performance and operability, and anyone who cares about how well software works in Production should buy and read a copy (there are paper and eBook editions).

Two other reviews might be useful too: my colleague Anant East (Head of Architecture and Infrastructure, thetrainline.com) wrote up a detailed review of Patterns for Performance and Operability on the tech blog at thetrainline.com, and I posted a short review on Amazon.

Continuous Delivery Workshop with Neal Ford (@neal4d) – a Retrospective

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I attended a workshop at DevWeek 2012 led by Neal Ford (@neal4d) on Continuous Delivery (CD). The day was excellent – Neal is a really engaging presenter – and I took copious notes, even though I’d already read most of the CD book. Fifteen months later, I thought it would be interesting to see how my notes from Neal’s workshop compared with my experience of Continuous Delivery, both within my job at thetrainline.com, and also in conversations with other people, particularly the good folks in the London Continuous Delivery meetup group.

The tl;dr version: go attend one of Neal’s excellent CD workshops, but be prepared for the challenges with Continuous Delivery to be much more social/organisational than technical.

Continue reading Continuous Delivery Workshop with Neal Ford (@neal4d) – a Retrospective

Who Owns My Operability?

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Includes recommended reading for software operability: SoftwareOperability.com

Software Operability

Operability is not something which can be ‘bolted on’ or retrofitted to software after it goes live; we need to design and build our software with operability as a first-class concern. You don’t build a bridge, then try to add load-bearing capabilities at the end of the project — but most software projects try to do exactly that, typically with costly results.

Ultimately, the product owner should be responsible for ensuring that operational requirements are prioritized alongside end-user features. If you are responsible for the software product or service, there is only one answer to the question

Who Owns My Operability?

Who Owns My Operability?

Update: the site now shows selected recommended reading on each page load.

(With a nod to whoownsmyavailability.com)

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Comic Relief, @garethr, @LordCope, and CloudFoundry at QConLondon 2013

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I attended QConLondon 2013 last week; what I took from the first four sessions in the Building for Clouds track was: cloud API and infrastructure automation tools have now solved most of the ‘easy’ cloud problems, but harder challenges (such as automating clusters) remain. The sessions were from Tim Savage (@timjsavage) and Zenon Hannick (@zenonhannick) on Comic Relief’s unique challenges with performance testing, Gareth Rushgrove (@garethr) on how to avoid PaaS lock-in, Stephen Nelson-Smith (@LordCope) on how to use Chef to give you ‘optionality’ with different cloud vendors, and Andrew Crump (@acrmp) and Chris Hedley (@ChristHedley) on the CloudFoundry cloud platform.

Continue reading Comic Relief, @garethr, @LordCope, and CloudFoundry at QConLondon 2013