to provision compute environments in seconds , rather than days , weeks or months on-prem was a huge advantage . We got a huge agility play , we got a cost play , and then , clearly , the access to innovation . All public cloud providers are spending billions in developing new cloud-based services , and for Vanguard to try to compete with that using our own on-prem engineers — it was just not something we were able to compete with .
So the three primary sources of value are :
1 . access to new technology because of the innovation and research being done by the cloud providers ; 2 . the clear cost reduction ; 3 . the agility play — an improvement in the speed in which to provision compute environments .
CTP : Let ’ s talk about the agility play for a bit . The big buzzword that helps in the world of agility is DevOps , and DevOps is a really confusing word . It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people . What does DevOps mean to you , and how does that contribute to the agility bit ?
Dowds : DevOps is a confusing label , and I personally spend a lot of time reading and researching thought leadership about DevOps . This thought leadership comes from what you see in research firms like Gartner and Forrester , but also through some of the thought leadership books that have been published on DevOps . I read all the research , read all the books , and at the end of all that knowledge gathering it was very clear to me that DevOps means different things to different people .
But we have settled on a way to think of DevOps at Vanguard . It ’ s a very broad perspective . It ’ s not , as the name would imply , moving Ops people into Dev shops , and allowing Dev shops to own responsibilities that you traditionally associate with the Ops guys . We look at a framework from Gartner that focuses on DevOps very broadly . It has the organizational / people changes that I referenced , such as moving Ops functions into delivery shops , and changing your organizational structure in delivery shops to be full stack . So you not only have the delivery function , but also the ops functions and any other center of excellence type functions that are normally outside delivery — trying to move all that end-to-end capability into a single organization .
People
Servant Leadership
Site Reliability Engineers
Infastructure as Code
One-Step Build , Test , Deploy
Technology
Full-Stack Teams
Autonomous Teams
Developer Self-Service
Monitor Everything
Job Rotation
Feature Teams
Platform Engineers
Integrated Tool Chains
ChatOps
Continuous Monitoring
Joint Meetings
Continuous Integration
Continuous Testing
Continuous Delivery
|
Minimum Viable Product
Small Batches
Automated Builds
Automated Testing
Release Automation
Canary Rollouts
Fail Forward
|
Instrument Everything
Version Everything
Test-driven Development
Technical Debt
Test Everything
Minimum Viable Process
Test-Driven Deployment
|
Feature Flags
Chaos Monkey
Common Metrics
Optimize Flow
Value Streams
Process
|
Culture
Trust Culture
Collaborative Culture
Collective Ownership
Never Done
Engineering Culture
Learning Culture
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Figure 1 : Based off of the Gartner DevOps Model
40 | THE DOPPLER | WINTER 2018