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Sarah Wells on FT's Transition to DevOps

In this podcast recorded at QCon London 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Sarah Wells, Technical Director for Operations and Reliability at the Financial Times about their adoption of DevOps.

Key Takeaways

  • Adopting DevOps is both a technology and a very significant culture change
  • It’s a big change for most developers to be operating the software they build and if you haven’t done it before, it’s terrifying
  • A safe culture means not looking for blame but focusing on how to fix and how to prevent things that do go wrong
  • The need for a really good relationship between technical teams and product people in order to explain the benefits of investing in technology improvements vs new features
  • Do everything you can to reduce the need for coordination with any external teams, because that slows you down

 

Show Notes

  • 00:31 Introductions
  • 01:45 An organisation full of smart people, not moving as fast as they could have done
  • 02:00 Adopting a DevOps culture, starting with automation
  • 02:10 The goal to provision in minutes rather than days
  • 02:18 They stopped tracking the improvement once provisioning times were down to minutes
  • 02:34 Looking for other opportunities to improve flow
  • 02:39 Adopting microservices architecture
  • 02:47 The focus on being able to release change regularly, moving from 12 releases per year to many thousands of releases every year
  • 03:04 This is not just a technology change, it is a big culture change
  • 03:07 To move fast people need to be able to make decisions themselves without waiting for others
  • 03:44 It’s a big change for most developers to be operating the software they build and if you haven’t done it before, it’s terrifying
  • 04:10 Examples of some of the production problems the teams have dealt with
  • 04:47 Microservices are complex and distributed and can interact in ways you don’t predict
  • 05:04 Safety has to come from the top – no blame
  • 05:25 Reviews that focus on what can be improved, not who to blame
  • 05:49 If you drop a database in production as a developer, that is not your fault. The fault is that it’s too easy to drop a database
  • 06:24 The mindset of experimentation – it’s not an experiment of there’s no hypothesis and it can’t fail (quoting Linda Rising)
  • 06:35 Most organisations say they are experimenting but they are really just trying
  • 06:45 The sunk-cost fallacy
  • 06:56 Experiments need to be quick and cheap
  • 07:02 How experimentation is built into the FT website
  • 07:32 Describing one experiment and how the data was used
  • 08:25 Making the “blast radius” small
  • 09:10 Microservices encourage decoupled design because the boundaries are very clear
  • 09:49 Buy – don’t build
  • 10:15 Using value chain mapping to identify the core business and focus on innovating in that area
  • 10:33 Moving from home-build cluster orchestration to Kubernetes
  • 11:25 The need for a really good relationship between technical teams and product people in order to explain the benefits of investing in technology improvements vs new features
  • 11:38 The flip side of moving fast is that sometimes the decision you make is wrong, and that needs to be OK
  • 11:54 Decisions fall into two categories – one-way door or two-way door
  • 12:10 Most decisions are easily reversible, like a two-way door
  • 12:18 Decide – commit – revisit
  • 12:40 Advances in technology have made it easy to make reversable decisions
  • 12:50 Comparing early hack-days with what is able to be achieved today
  • 14:15 Advice for other organisations
  • 14:23 Migration to microservices by carving off small pieces
  • 14:33 You need an automated release pipeline
  • 14:46 Architect for zero-downtime deployments
  • 15:27 Do everything you can to reduce the need for coordination with any external teams, because that slows you down
  • 14:42 Find a way to get architectural guidance, but don’t impose architectural signoff
  • 15:49 Change approval boards slow you down but do not increase the likelihood of successful change
  • 16:17 Architects need to become part of the delivery teams rather than working in a silo
  • 16:25 At FT they have moved to Principal Engineer roles rather than architects –
  • 16:47 The need for T-shaped skills across the whole team
  • 17:20 The impact on career planning, moving away from a ladder towards a map that covers many areas at different levels of competency
  • 18:28 The value of a learning culture
  • 18:43 The value of a very diverse team

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