A story about a boy and his quest to build great software delivered at the Cloud Foundry Summit in Santa Clara May 2015. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX4mQHPWuUY) Walk through the history of my personal career, and the evolution of the industry highlighting themes like devops, microservices and platforms.

1. devops, microservices and platforms, oh my!
Andrew Clay Shafer
Senior Director of Techology

2. systems thinking is the new black

3. a stone cutter’s quest for nice things

4. Andrew Clay Shafer

5. Andrew Clay Shafer
@littleidea

6. Three Stone Cutters walk into a
Pareto Inefficient Nash Equilibrium

8. start with the conclusion

9. devops,
platforms,
continuous delivery,
microservices…

10. These things are all one…

11. In the beginning…

12. not the beginning beginning

13. I got a job as a developer…

14. I was smart…

15. I had no idea what I was doing…

16. I was left to my own devices…

17. • no experience
• no mentors
• no testing
• no backups
• no version control
• no automation
¯_(ツ)_/¯

18. a boy, a server and force of will

19. it mostly worked

20. next stop… grad school

21. Computational Science
• model bioelectric fields
• solve for measurements
• visualize
• rinse and repeat

22. learned a few things
• technical debt
• Conway’s Law
• subversion
• little to no testing

23. Venture Funded Solutions
in search of problems

24. Linux ‘server’ in your Pocket
• custom board
• 400 MHz PowerPC
• 64 MB SDR SDRAM
• 512 MB NAND FLASH
• USB Powered
• biometric auth

25. Big Vision
• Identity Solution
• Policy Based Provisioning
• Citrix Desktop
• On demand ‘deb’ package
• Poison Pill
• Mostly Worked

26. Learned More Things
• Formative
• Learned to Computer
• Introduced to Agile™
• Testing
• Project Management
• Lord Conway Reigns
• Disassociated Identity

27. The next chapter
• eCommerce 2.0
• J2EE
• DIY Square Wheels
• Outsourced Ops
• Brittle
• Expensive

28. very clever solutions

29. Automation…
• write a script for common tasks
• share the scripts around office
• modify the scripts for new task
• hope things works

30. Typical Day at Work

31. the mission
begins

32. to change the relationship
between people and computers

33. actually, needed to change the
relationship between people and people

36. Velocity 2009

39. Amazon, a bookstore in Seattle, deploys
code to production every 11 seconds…

40. –Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon
“The traditional model is that you take your software to the wall
that separates development and operations, and throw it over
and then forget about it. Not at Amazon. You build it, you run it.
This brings developers into contact with the day-to-day
operation of their software. It also brings them into day-to-day
contact with the customer. This customer feedback loop is
essential for improving the quality of the service.”

41. everybody looks at Amazon and rushes to copy features

42. but the features are superficial
the Amazon advantage is the process and culture

43. Operations is the secret sauce configuration

44. Day 2 matters

45. Principles > Practices >Tools

46. let’s rewind that

47. Software in the beginning
• shipped on physical media
• hard to change after release
• runs on other peoples computers
• have to worry about bugs
• process doesn’t run very long
• no worries about uptime

48. Software Developer
changes ideas into code

49. The Process
• have a good idea!
• request a server
• get a purchase order from supervisor
• wait
• wait
• server arrives
• server gets power and network
• server gets operating system
• start to configure for deploy
Traditional IT

50. The System Admin
• keeps systems running
• don’t care about your application
• not paid to care
• other people waiting for their servers
• might have to worry about many
other servers
• and email
• and printers

51. The shift to services
• the internet changes everything
• runs on other your computers
• can change your computers
• still have to worry about bugs
• process run a long time
• uptime is everything

52. bigger, faster, stronger

53. But we are an enterprise, we are
different, we cannot do this, we
have our ways.

54. service management? ITIL

55. seemed like a good idea
slow everything down

56. Is moving slow an advantage?

57. dev ops

58. are misaligned incentives an
advantage?

59. not how the web was built
competitive
disadvantage

60. The Stories We Tell

61. configuration
management for
the masses

62. The Process
• have a good idea!
• request a server
• get a server in minutes
• run configuration tools
• everything is up in minutes

63. Principles > Practices >Tools

64. Adrian Cockroft - ex-Netflix
What I learned from my time at Netflix.

65. Netflix Lessons
• Speed wins in the marketplace
• Remove friction from product development
• High trust, low process, no hand-offs between teams
• Freedom and responsibility culture
• Don’t do your own undifferentiated heavy lifting
• use simple patterns automated by tooling
• self service cloud makes impossible things instant

66. But we are an enterprise, we do not have the
talent to do this.
“But Netflix has a superstar development team,
we don’t”

67. “Netflix hired them from you,
and got out of their way.”

68. Time
Risk
the impact of batch size

69. both faster and safer

71. –W Edwards Deming
“It is not necessary to change.
Survival is not mandatory.”

72. Netflix built a platform to enable
self service deployment

73. Netflix built a platform to deploy
and operate microservices

74. Netflix built a platform to
continuously deliver software

75. Netflix built a platform that could
protect itself from failure

76. What Netflix did not do is build a platform
for general ad-hoc automation…

77. A platform makes promises.
Constraints are the contract that
allows the platform to keep promises.

79. Principles > Practices >Tools

80. devops refers to the practices
and tools that emerge from high
performing organizations

81. continuous delivery results as a
consequence of devops practice

82. continuous delivery is
not possible with
gating and handoffs

83. continuous delivery is
untenable, if the fixed cost of
deployment is high

84. microservices describes the first
post-cloud, post-devops, post-
continuous delivery architecture

85. microservices leverage baseline
operational capabilities and team
dynamics to isolate failure and
maximize velocity

86. continuously delivered
microservices are the natural
evolution for services that need to
run at scale and be changed
frequently

87. Amazon, Google, Netflix, Flickr,
Etsy, WealthFront, Lyft, Uber,
Shopzilla, Pied Piper, all built one
off platforms to do this

88. continous delivery - why
devops - how
microservices - what

89. the solution: a platform

90. Do you want to build one?

92. maybe we can build one together

93. The Process
• have a good idea!
• push code to platform
• code is running in seconds
• self service
• self healing
• and they all lived happily ever
after

94. no one originally set out to do devops,
continuous delivery, microservices, or
platforms these were natural consequences
don’t fixate on the words, fixate on the outcomes

95. This is not the end…

96. mobile, internet of things, big data
everything is getting bigger and faster