Continuous Delivery for Legacy/Heritage Systems – LondonCD meetup June 2017

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

This is part 3 of a 4-part series of articles based on discussions at the LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. The other posts are linked at the end of this article.

Applying the principles and practices of Continuous Delivery for new software is fairly straightforward (at least, until you deal with data and databases). However, existing “legacy” systems that were built without many automated tests and without much concern for repeatable deployments of discrete functionality pose a challenge for moving to Continuous Delivery.

Office Lens 20170612-205923

Continue reading Continuous Delivery for Legacy/Heritage Systems – LondonCD meetup June 2017

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)

Operability: a DevOps cornerstone – new eBook from HighOps

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

HighOps operability eBook - coverOne of the driving forces behind DevOps is the increasing prevalence of complex, distributed software systems which calls for a substantially different approach to building ‘business’ software systems: an approach that anticipates and expects failures, transient behaviour, emergent states, and unpredictability; and ensures that failure responses are gradual, graceful, and graphable.

‘Making software work well’ in this dynamic, interconnected world is the focus of Software Operability, a subject I have been writing and speaking about for some time.

I recently began working with IT operations experts HighOps (@gotHighOps) and we have published a free eBook Operability: a DevOps Cornerstone. The book covers the fundamentals of operability, why it’s relevant, how to build and sustain a focus on operability,and how operability relates to both DevOps and IT service management approaches such as ITIL.

If you lead the Technology division, head up a software development department or IT operations department, or lead a development or operations team, and want to understand why and how to make your software systems work better, then this book is for you. If you are involved in Service Transition or Service Operation, this eBook will help you to make the case for a strong focus on the operational aspects of the software being delivered. Similarly, if your role is a Software Architect, you will find here sound practical guidance for improving how your software works
in Production.

Download the HighOps eBook ‘Operability: a DevOps Cornerstone’ here.

DevOps Questions from Unicom DevOps Summit Feb 2014

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

At the Unicom DevOps Summit event in London on February 28th 2014 we experimented with some extra audience/attendee participation by asking for questions on record cards and encouraged people to ‘dot-vote‘ on the questions most interesting to them. There were some good questions, but unfortunately we did not get chance to discuss many of them, so here are all the questions from the card board, along with some very brief attempts at answers.

  • Should security be a part of DevOps?
  • To what extent and how do you insist on standardisation for multiple Scrum + ‘DevOps’ teams with no separate Operations team?
  • What’s the likely process flow of / disruptions to / duration of DevOps adoption?
  • Where does ‘Operations’ sit in the ITIL model? All over the place? e.g. Service Transition?
  • How about some example scenarios? Tangible comparison points would be useful.
  • Where does DevOps start and finish (from a process perspective)?
  • Is DevOps just a job title?
  • Is co-location of resource necessary for successful DevOps?
  • How essential is cloud technology to DevOps?
  • How will the announcement that ThoughtWorks are ‘open sourcing’ their Go DevOps product affect other vendor products? Why pay for other products?
  • There are a lot of open source DevOps/release/orchestration tools – is anyone using (or know about) the Windows equivalent?
  • How do you overcome developer resistance to writing Run Book docs? Are the processes to drive adoption? Is it a sackable offence?

Continue reading DevOps Questions from Unicom DevOps Summit Feb 2014

DevOps Summit December 2013, Bangalore: Software Operability and Run Book Collaboration

Posted on by Matthew Skelton

On 18th December 2013 I presented at DevOps Summit in Bangalore (organised by Unicom Learning Pvt), speaking about the improvements in software operability which DevOps can bring:

Software Operability talk at DevOps Summit Bangalore

One of the goals of DevOps is to make software systems work better in Production, and this characteristic of ‘working well in Production’ is known as operability. Here are the slides I used (available from http://www.slideshare.net/matthewskelton/software-operability-and-run-book-collaboration-29511196):