This is a short blog about my highlights during the DevOps Pro talks I visited. I took out 3 talk to talk a bit about. That were both the opening keynotes and a talk about Business Analists. Besides the talks I also highlighted some items I found interesting during this conference.
A Practical Path towards Becoming a High Performance (IT) Organization
Horizon 1 dilemma like Kodak, they invented the first digital camera way before other companies thought of it. But kepth investing in Horizon 1, almost becoming there downfall. Great blog in Dutch: https://www.adformatie.nl/design/wie-wordt-de-kodak-jouw-branche
Img for a great blog about it: https://medium.com/frameplay/planning-for-future-growth-with-the-three-horizons-model-for-innovation-18ab29086ede
We need to Experiment into Horizon 3 and don’t be afraid to kill your darlings. We need to develop oppertunities in Horizon 2. Optimise and lower running cost in Horizon 1.
Michel also reffered to the State of DevOps report that tells you about the current status of DevOps within Companies.
Business Analist activities in CD Environment
A talk about the Business Analist and what he can do in a DevOps team. According to the speaker he is a support role to the team. He will support with writing documentation, writing specs, working our requirements, writting Given When Then and getting the customer feedback.
Question: Why not let the team self-organise to do these activities? What makes the BA special to do this talk?
Answer: Members of the team can focus on delivering value and the BA on things that are not as valuable.
My opinion: This is dangerous and an anti-pattern, because we have someone that has focus on jobs that are not producing value by itsself and we might have someone that is looking for more work. Adding work for the team, but not adding value.
The summary of this talk.
Portable Pipelines
Take away 1: Slow pipelines are killing us. Just imagine if you have to deploy a new version to production because of a bug and you have to wait for an hour (Or even someone out of the audience had a pipeline that would take six hours to run).
Take away 2: A lot of companies are using pipelines with plugins and with that they create statefull pipeline that creates a big vendor lockin. If you don’t want this and want a vendor portable pipeline. The best solution is moving to Yaml & Bash to not have a vendor login and the basis you can easily migrate to another CI/CD tool.
Extra Google Go: Easy to use development language you can use cross OS/Platform without any problem.
Other nice outtakes of the conference:
Security: We cannot Prevent, We cannot Protect, We can only Detect. Use honeypots to lure hackers to other environments and not your production system where your customers are on. More on Honeypots: https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-iot-what-is-a-honeypot.html
GitHub Actions: Bas Peters from GitHub had a talk about the use of GitHub Actions to automate your workflow in GitHub directly. This was a really good demo about GitHub Actions and how it will help us automate directly in GitHub. Read more about GitHub Actions: https://github.com/features/actions
DevOps Lets Change QA: My own talk was about how QA should change with the change to DevOps. The slides of my talk you will find here on slideshare.
For me it was the first time at the DevOps Pro Days. I really was suprises with all the good mix between technical & non technical subjects. All the technical subjects were good to follow and I really got a lot new insights!
P.s. The video’s to DevOps Days will follow soon, I will add the link to those later.
Geoffrey Arij van der Tas 