DevOps Days London 2022

Written by Nick Otter.

Intro

We (8x8) attended DevOps Days London 2022 this week. Here are my personal takeaways. For fun and laziness - I am only listing each takeaway as a one liner, to be explored in more depth outside of this post.

Platform as a Product

• Use PACT (code-first consumer-driven contract testing tool) to test Infrastructure.
• SLA contracts for platform changes that have to pass Dev tests before deployment.
• Platform resources are not considered implicit, there is a feature roadmap.
• User personas for Dev teams, try and group dev needs as user personas.
• Platform repos are completely open to Dev, innersource mentality - dev can PR immediate changes they need if there is too much of a backlog of work.
• Understand Thin platform team or Fat platform team.

Issues with Embedded DevOps

• A dedicated DevOps engineer per Dev team creates Siloing and Code sprawl. Tribal knowledge is required to unify all DevOps individuals embedded in Dev teams.

DevOps transfomations

• Evangelise Operations orchestrating DevOps not Dev movement to DevOps which squeezes out Operations.
• Understand Operations DevOps vs. Cloud Engineer/Platform engineer vs. Embedded DevOps.

Working past ‘DevOps’ as a job title

• DevOps as a job title is far too tenuous.
• ‘DevOps engineer’ may mean working as Operations, much time spent working on Production with some dev tooling.
• ‘DevOps engineer’ may mean acting as an informal Platform Architect.
• ‘DevOps engineer’ may mean being a Cloud Engineer.

DevOps metrics of success

• DORA.
• SLA contracts for platform changes that have to pass Dev tests before deployment.
• CALMS - Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing.
• DiRT - Disaster Recovery Test, regular firedrills.

Terraform

• Be wary of Terraform module dependencies.

Incidents

• Weekly firedrills, DiRT weekly type events.
• Service can’t go live without thorough documentation and incidence response steps.
• Documentation should pass the ‘3am test’.
• Diverse pool of engineers on call at the same time, primary can escalate to SME.
• Who can fix it in 10mins? Don’t chase your losses.

Misc

• ‘Centralised platform architecture to collaborative platform architecture’
• ‘Domain based boundaries for services’
• ‘CUPID idiomatic vs. SOLID’
• ‘An architectural quantum’
• Using Pulumi, single language, single framework with Dev
• Application driven systems, decoupled from cloud provider
• Feature management DevOps.
• Team topologies.
• Flow aligned, complex subsystems.
• Keep deployment configuration in Dev codebase as much as possible
• ‘Open source license auditor, audits most dependended upon open source projects’

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Thanks. This was written by Nick Otter.