from silos to devops: our story

From Silos to DevOps:

Our (in Progress) Story

April 2, 2015

Gil Irizarry (Director of Engineering, Tools)

David Murgatroyd (VP, Engineering)

Our Goal for this talk

● Talk about DevOps

● ...and how it fits into Basis...

● ...and discuss the future (ours and yours)

Quick survey: How many of us...

● Work for companies whose product is

delivered via SaaS?

● … but that didn’t start out doing SaaS (e.g.,

delivered on-premise products)?

● … and consider your deployment strategy

less than ideal?

● How many attended the previous talk?

And now for some...

What is DevOps?

● From Wikipedia: a software development

method that stresses communication,

collaboration, integration, automation and

measurement of cooperation between

software developers and other IT

professionals.

● Acknowledges the interdependence of

software development, quality assurance,

and IT operations, and aims to help an

organization rapidly produce software ... and

to improve operations performance.

DevOps principles: CAMS

Culture

Automation

Measurement

Sharing

From Damon

Edwards and John Willis

Some (likely apocryphal) stories:

● The Banana Corporation

● Best Buy

From http://itrevolution.com/devops-culture-

part-1/

Background reading

● History of DevOps:

http://itrevolution.com/the-history-of-devops/

● Convergence of DevOps:

http://itrevolution.com/the-convergence-of-

devops/

● http://dev2ops.org/

The Basis Story

● Delivering on-premise text analytics libraries

(e.g., jars) for ~15 years

● Customers across many industries and

around the world -- you may have used us

today without knowing it

● Rolling-out of a text analytics API later this

year -- currently servicing Alpha users

Producing an On-Prem Library v. a Service

Library Service

What we deliver A tarball RESTful API

How often we

deliver

Release a few times a

quarter

Deploy a few times a

day

When something

goes wrong

Customers email us Monitors page us

Most important

system to keep up

Build machines Runtime service

Key software

measurements

Speed & accuracy (value to

customers)

… and also utilization

(cost to operate)

Key components Open source libraries (e.g.,

Apache’s)

IaaS tools (e.g., AWS’s)

What we do at Basis

● Bamboo for automated builds, pulling code

from git repositories

● Builds tagged by development as ‘release’

get pulled into a custom-baked AMI on AWS

integrated with auto-scaling

● Custom script uses the AMI to deploy EC2

instances, ELBs and infrastructure.

What we do at Basis

● The good news: software-defined

infrastructure (SDI)

● Also good news: IT and Dev have worked

together from the start to define the

deployment process

● Needs improvement: deployments are still

kicked off manually (but hey, we’re still in

alpha)

Now and Future

● Now: We have a de-facto DevOps team

composed of IT, Tools, RelEng, and Eng,

but…

● Future: We aspire to

create a NoOps

environment. But what

is “NoOps”?

● NoOps is the concept that an IT environment

can become so automated and abstracted

from the underlying infrastructure that there

is no need for a dedicated team to manage

software in-house.

● FYI, Forrester coined the

term NoOps, here’s a

table of theirs...

What is NoOps?

Why NoOps for Basis?

● empower developers (developer-defined

infrastructure - DDI) ○ Check out http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/01/the-

geek-shall-inherit-the-earth-the-age-of-developer-

defined-infrastructure/

● reduce the effort needed to maintain the

deployment

● transition to SaaS without building up a large

Ops team

Discussion topics? Suggestions...

● What are the challenges with NoOps?

● What advice would you give us (Basis)?

● From what different traditional software

engineering roles do folks transition into

*Ops?

● How does *Ops affect your software

development methodology? How do you

reconcile fixed-length sprints in a continuous

deployment environment?

● Is Basis hiring *Ops? (Hint: yes.)