Talk given at 25. Handelsblatt Jahrestagung Strategisches IT-Management in Munich on 2019-01-23. Original title (German): "Developer Experience bei Zalando: Entwicklerproduktivität steigern mit Cloud Native Infrastruktur" - Wie macht man mehr als 1100 Entwickler glücklich und effektiv? - Entwickler als Kunde: Produktmanagement für Plattformteams - You build it – you run it: Self-Service-Infrastruktur mit Kubernetes und AWS - Der Weg vom klassischen Infrastrukturteam zu Developer Productivity als Abteilung

1. HANDELSBLATT
JAHRESTAGUNG
2019-01-23
HENNING JACOBS
@try_except_
Developer
Experience
at Zalando

2. 2
ZALANDO AT A GLANCE
~ 4.5billion EUR
revenue 2017
> 200
million
visits
per
month
> 15.000
employees in
Europe
> 70%
of visits via
mobile devices
> 24
million
active customers
> 300.000
product choices
~ 2.000
brands
17
countries

3. 3
Platform
> 1100
developers
> 200
development teams

4. 4
YOU BUILD IT, YOU RUN IT
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.
- A Conversation with Werner Vogels, ACM Queue, 2006

5. 5
ON-CALL: YOU OWN IT, YOU RUN IT
When things are broken,
we want people with the best
context trying to fix things.
- Blake Scrivener, Netflix SRE Manager

6. 6
DEVELOPER JOURNEY
Consistent story
that models
all aspects of SW dev

7. 7
Developer
Journey

8. 8
Developer
Journey
Correctness
Compliance
GDPR
Security
Cost Efficiency
24x7 On Call
Governance
Resilience
Capacity
...

9. 9
DEVELOPER PRODUCTIVITY
Code Build Test Deploy OperateSetup
Cloud Native Application Runtime

10. 10
CLOUD NATIVE
.. uses an open source software stack to deploy
applications as microservices, packaging each part into
its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those
containers to optimize resource utilization.
Cloud native technologies enable software developers to
build great products faster.
- https://www.cncf.io/

11. 11
CONTAINERS END-TO-END
Code Build Test Deploy OperateSetup
Cloud Native Application Runtime

12. 12
CONTAINERS

13. 13
CONTAINERS

15. 15
PLAN & SETUP

16. 16
Plan
Stories
Rules of Play
Tech Radar

18. 18
Setup
Application
Bootstrapping

21. 21
BUILD & TEST

22. 22
CDPGit
code
push
CONTINUOUS DELIVERY PLATFORM: BUILD

24. 24
DEPLOY

25. 25
Deploy
Kubernetes

26. 26
DEPLOYMENT CONFIGURATION
├── deploy/apply
│ ├── deployment.yaml
│ ├── credentials.yaml # Zalando IAM
│ ├── ingress.yaml
│ └── service.yaml
└── delivery.yaml # Zalando CI/CD

27. 27
INGRESS.YAML
kind: Ingress
metadata:
name: "..."
spec:
rules:
# DNS name your application should be exposed on
- host: "myapp.foo.example.org"
http:
paths:
- backend:
serviceName: "myapp"
servicePort: 80

28. 28
CONTINUOUS DELIVERY PLATFORM

29. 29
CDP: DEPLOY

30. 30
CDP: OPTIONAL APPROVAL

31. 31
INTEGRATIONS

32. 32
CLOUD FORMATION VIA CI/CD
├── deploy/apply
│ ├── deployment.yaml # Kubernetes
│ ├── cf-iam-role.yaml # AWS IAM Role
│ ├── cf-rds.yaml # AWS RDS Database
│ ├── kube-ingress.yaml
│ ├── kube-secret.yaml
│ └── kube-service.yaml
└── delivery.yaml # CI/CD config
"Infrastructure as Code"

33. 33
POSTGRES OPERATOR
Application to manage
PostgreSQL clusters on
Kubernetes
>500
clusters running
on Kubernetes

34. 34
SUMMARY
• Application Bootstrapping
• Git as source of truth and UI
• 4-eyes principle for master/production
• Extensible Kubernetes API as primary interface
• OAuth/IAM credentials
• PostgreSQL
• CloudFormation for proprietary AWS services

35. 35
DELIVERY PERFORMANCE METRICS
• Lead Time
• Release Frequency
• Time to Restore Service
• Change Fail Rate

36. 36
CONTAINERS
From "Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps"

37. 37
DELIVERY PERFORMANCE METRICS
• Lead Time
• Release Frequency
• Time to Restore Service
• Change Fail Rate
≙ Commit to Prod
≙ Deploys/week/dev
≙ MTRS from incidents
≙ n/a

38. “.. means establishing empathy with internal
consumers (read: developers) and collaborating
with them on the design. Platform product managers
establish roadmaps and ensure the platform delivers
value to the business and enhances the developer
experience.”
- ThoughtWorks Technology Radar

40. 40
DEVELOPER SATISFACTION

41. 41
DOCUMENTATION
"Documentation is hard to find"
"Documentation is not comprehensive enough"
"Remove unnecessary complexity and obstacles."
"Get the documentation up to date and prepare
use cases"
"More and more clear documentation"
"More detailed docs, example repos with more
complicated deployments."

42. 42
DOCUMENTATION
• Restructure following
https://www.divio.com/en/blog/documentation/
• Concepts
• How Tos
• Tutorials
• Reference
• Global Search
• Weekly Health Check: Support → Documentation

44. 44
NEWSLETTER
"You can now.."
• You can now benefit from the most recent
Kubernetes 1.12 features, e.g. ..
• You can now analyse your Kotlin project with
SonarQube and upload your Scala code coverage
report to SonarQube

45. 45
SIGNAL: ISSUE UPVOTES

46. 46
TESTIMONIALS
“Useful information, good level of details and pleasant to
read. It's one of the few newsletters that I took time to
read entirely :)”
- a reader, July 2018

47. 47
TESTIMONIALS
“So, thank you, Team Automata, for listening to our
community, taking our upvotes in consideration when
developing new solutions and building every day
'the first CI that doesn't suck'.”
- a user, October 2018

48. 48
LEARNINGS
FROM THE PAST

49. 49
LEARNINGS FROM THE PAST
• Platform as a service vs governance
• Platform teams think they are "special",
but lack basic customer insights
• Developers love autonomy,
hard to "go back" once granted
• Developers are demanding

50. 50
NOTE TO SELF
• Establish a product mindset
• Listen to your customers
• Exploit unfair advantages
• Invest into docs & support

51. QUESTIONS?
HENNING JACOBS
HEAD OF
DEVELOPER PRODUCTIVITY
henning@zalando.de
@try_except_
Illustrations by @01k