Chuck Norris Doesn’t Need DevOps…but the rest of us might benefit

Daniel BryantCTO, Instant Access Technologies

d.bryant@iatltd.com@taidevcouk

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

epoints.com

• At the center of IAT’s offerings

• Customer rewards/loyalty

• Earn everywhere– Online shopping– Social sites– Your company? (partnerships available!)

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

epoints.com 2012/13 Upgrade…

• Increasing traffic – Scalability being stretched

• Increasingly diverse requirements

• Our starting point– Developers creating monolithic application– Manual QA– Operations deploying to data center

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Core Changes…

• Service-Oriented Architecture

• Cloud-based deployments

• DevOps Culture

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

What is DevOps?

• “DevOps is a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) professionals.”

• “DevOps […] aims to help an organization rapidly produce software products and services”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

So, What’s Chuck Norris Doing Here?

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Chuck Norris doesn’t need DevOps……as a one-man army he codes with one hand, tests with the other and deploys with his beard

The rest of us……work in teams to develop software

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Software Development Teams

• Developers

• Quality Assurance

• Operations

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Software Development Teams

• Developers

• Quality Assurance

• Operations

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Software Development Teams

• Developers

• Quality Assurance

• Operations

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

This silo mentality has to stop

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Culture is vital

• Culture drives behaviour, drives culture…– Everyone is responsible for delivery– Systems thinking– Continuous experimentation and learning

• Not easy to change culture– The hardest part of DevOps…– …but you get to learn new things

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Changing Culture

• Greenfield– Flickr’s story (slidesha.re/sHpYV)– Sandro Mancuso “Why other people don’t get it”

(slidesha.re/1bcStpe)

• Enterprise– “The Pheonix Project” by Gene Kim et al

• Create an effective team– Martijn Verburg “Habits of highly effective technical teams”

(bit.ly/1aF9SnK)

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Chuck Norris doesn’t do iterative development……all applications Chuck Norris creates are right first time, every time

The rest of us……need to enable agility (and ideally facilitate continuous delivery)

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

We all do CI, right?

• “Continuous Delivery” is the next step– Book by Jez Humble and Dave Farley– Great InfoQ Video (bit.ly/XugWi8)

• Create a “build pipeline”– Goal is fast feedback

• Continuous Deployment– Awesome, but we don’t deploy to production (yet…)

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Gotchas

• Managing dependencies in SOA is hard, very hard

• Branching– Gitflow, Branch Per Feature, or Trunk– Integrate from ‘develop’ branch

• Migrating data can be challenging– Liquibase / Flyway– MongoDB / Solr Schema versions in data– Wooga case study (bit.ly/1egArDC)

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Chuck Norris doesn’t do QA……Chuck Norris can test an entire application with a single assert (and get 110% code coverage)

The rest of us……need high-quality automated QA

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Automating QA

• Unit testing is essential

• Intra-component integration testing– Spock is awesome (code.google.com/p/spock)

– Utilise embedded datastore/middleware

• Inter-component integration testing– The hardest part of SOA…

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Automating QA

• Performance– JMeter + plugins (jmeter-plugins.org)– BlazeMeter

• Website– Selenium (www.seleniumhq.org)– Geb (www.gebish.org)

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Automating QA

• Make it easy for everyone to execute

• Include within the build pipeline

• Make people care – fail the build!

• “Agile Testing” by Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Chuck Norris doesn’t need an OS……his keyboard has two keys, 0 and 1

The rest of us……need to provision bare metal, and also be comfortable with the OS

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Say No To Snowflakes!

• Infrastructure as Code– Version control everything

• Automate all provisioning– Chef, Puppet, SaltStack, Python, AWS CLI

• Play with Vagrant (www.vagrantup.com)– “providers” are super cool

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Thinking/Acting Like A Sysadmin

• Learn Linux fundamentals

• Diagnostic skills– top, iotop, iostat, netstat, vmstat– Java utils: jps, jstat, jmap, jhat– “DevOps Troubleshooting” by Kyle Rankin

• Maybe grow a beard…

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Chuck Norris doesn’t fail……he just finds a new way in which reality is broken

The rest of us……should plan for failure

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Design for failure

“Everything fails all the time [in the cloud]”Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com

• 21st Century Application Architecture– www.skillsmatter.com (bit.ly/10jAdSV)

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Design for failure

• Design patterns– Asynchronous communication– Timeouts / retries– Bulkheads / circuit-breakers

• Inspiration– Chris Richardson (slidesha.re/1ft3vsg)– Netflix (bit.ly/1h5GMid)

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

All arrays Chuck Norris creates are of infinite size……as Chuck Norris knows no bounds

The rest of us……should manage our resources and cultivate ‘mechanical sympathy’

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Mechanical Sympathy

• Be aware of deployment platform properties

• …especially if in the cloud– 1000Mbps network max transfer ~125MB/s– EBS Optimised? PIOPs?– “Noisy neighbours”

• Monitor everything (more on this later)

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

When Chuck Norris throws Exceptions……everybody knows about it because they land outside of the data center

The rest of us……should log all errors (and other vital information for diagnostic purposes)

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Logging

• Log pretty much everything– Use appropriate levels

• Make comments searchable/machine readable– Good tips (bit.ly/hweqm4)

• Use centralised logging – Especially if in the cloud– Logstash, Loggly, Papertrail

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Chuck Norris doesn’t worry about application downtime……Chuck Norris’ production servers are so scared they constantly ping him

The rest of us……should monitor everything

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Monitor All The Things!

• Infrastructure monitoring– Nagios– Zabbix

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Metrics

• Dropwizard’s Metrics is very cool– metrics.codahale.com

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Gauges, Counters, Meters, Timers…

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Health Checks

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Inspirational Metrics Companies

• Several trail-blazers– Etsy (www.codeascraft.com)– Netflix (techblog.netflix.com)

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

In Summary…

• DevOps is driving agile into QA and Ops

• Faster, leaner and more effective software– The ability to experiment is awesome!

• There are some real benefits behind the buzz

• Now is the time to step-up as a developer

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

The Developers DevOps Action Plan

• Think about your company culture• Explore continuous delivery• Learn Linux basics• Automate provisioning• Design for failure• Cultivate mechanical sympathy• Improve logging/metrics

12/04/2023 @taidevcouk

Thanks For Listening

• Massive thanks to all the IAT team– Especially our DevOps guru, Jamie Clarkson

• Questions / comments?– d.bryant@iatltd.com– @taidevcouk