The Doppler Quarterly Winter 2018 | Page 42

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
Figure 1 : Based off of the Gartner DevOps Model
40 | THE DOPPLER | WINTER 2018