You are more important than you have ever been Adam Jacob, Chief Customer Officer

Email: adam@opscode.com

Twitter: @adamhjk

Who am I?

•  Adam Jacob

•  Chief Customer Officer, Opscode – secret code name for “Dude that wrote the first pass at Chef”

•  17 years as a Systems Administrator

•  As Opscode has grown, I’ve become the guy that helps customers with gnarly problems find solutions •  A bit of advice: awesome work if you can get it

Why are we here?

The obvious reasons

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I’m feeling more philosophical than that, though

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We care about two things, apparently…

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Continuous

Delivery http://www.flickr.com/photos/akrabat/8495425183/

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And for me, personally, how was becoming a critical problem

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Getting to Why

The map is not the territory

•  Devops is a response to, and post-facto justification for, a shift in the functional meaning of IT.

•  Continuous Delivery is a response to, and post-facto justification for, a shift in expectations about the pace of innovation in applications by consumers of those applications

Magritte - The Pipe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MagrittePipe.jpg

Globalization

•  Integration in commodity, capital, and labor markets

•  It took 40 years for container ships to move 70% of sea-borne trade by value (from 1968 to 2008)

•  It took 22 years for internet access to reach 78% penetration in North America (1990-2012). •  Online retail sales are 7% of all retail sales

•  75% of 2011 Thanksgiving shoppers did so online

•  42% of all retail purchases were influenced by online research – accounting for ~50% of total retail spending.

Internet penetration continues to push forward globally

Source: Wikipedia, via the Internation Telecommunications Union

95% of the western world own cellular phones

• 42% are Smartphones • 58% will be on the next

purchase. • 4.2 Billion Phones globally, for

7.09 Billion People.

http://ssiknowledgewatch.com/2012/05/09/cell-phones-approach-total-penetration-globally-with-smartphones-moving-toward-market-dominance-2/

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/1/26/digital-divide-global-household-penetration-rates-for-technology.aspx?pageid=1

Software is the interface for consumption

Let’s talk about bananas for a second

•  Uganda has a huge, mainly subsistence banana farming culture •  Cell phone coverage expanded from 46%

of the population in 2003 to 70% in 2005. •  Japanese study covered 856 households

in 96 communities. •  41 of those had coverage in 2003, 87 did

in 2005. •  50% to 69% increase in participation for

people who live 20 miles or more from center http://www.csae.ox.ac.uk/conferences/2008-edia/papers/144-muto.pdf http://www.flickr.com/photos/shanidov/2996102037/

What really happened?

•  Traders had better access to farmers •  You didn’t even have to own a

cell phone to benefit! •  Still not perfect – there is still a

large information asymmetry between the traders (who know the prices) and the farmers (who just want to sell their dang bananas)

So how long before we get this?

Private Banana Trader

NANA

This is the future of the global economy

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The world of IT moved from the back office to the front

•  In every business we talked about except bananas, IT was historically a source of internal efficiency

•  As more and more customers prefer digital consumption, that role shifts to one that is increasingly customer centric – the front of the business, not the back

•  Every technology that previously impacted only internal business functions now directly supports customer interactions!

Devops

•  Is the cultural and professional movement that grew directly from the collective experience of the pioneers of this transition

•  It’s application to traditional IT is 1:1 – the shift in consumption will be ubiquitous.

•  This means the need for the business adaptations encapsulated in Devops will eventually be essentially ubiquitous as well

At least, if you want to be great at the next couple

decades of global economic growth

Applications became customer service vehicles

•  Prior to this transition, customer service problems were mitigated by human beings

“The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.” – Sam Walton (Walmart)

•  They are now mitigated by software and infrastructure updates

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” – Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com)

Continuous Delivery

•  Is the discipline that grew out of this reality

•  Businesses needed to be able to deliver on a better customer experience as quickly, and safely, as possible.

•  Safety matters! Simply moving quickly towards failure is an awfully bad customer experience, which is why we spent so long building crazy blockades to progress in the name of safety in the first place.

•  Failure to do so will have serious impacts on customer satisfaction and loyalty – just like it did when Sam Walton was the Ghengis Kahn of rural retail.

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The only difference is one of perspective

How can we learn to be great at this? None of us should be thought of as anything less than our potential to change the world – Jesse Leach

First: we don’t confuse the map for the territory

We are here because we are building the best possible customer experience. These things are not good in and of themselves – they are not ice cream. But ice cream is delicious.

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5

Strong cultures of personal empowerment and accountability

•  The number one indicator of success

•  Focus on responsibility and accountability, rather than authority, controls, and process.

•  Software teams have responsibility for design, implementation, and administration of their products and services – cradle to grave.

•  Architecture, Security, Systems Administration, and QA become universal responsibilities, with experts who set standards and build tools to enable the business to do the right thing.

•  Business leaders set priorities and direction, and have close communication loops with teams doing implementation work.

•  Companies that get this wrong…

•  Have a strong reliance on centralized decision making and environmental gates.

•  Cannot ever point at individuals who are responsible for outcomes

•  Have few, if any, capable “full stack” engineers

•  Have a crap-ton of “Architects” responsible for high level design, but no real commitment to implementation

Treating failure as a learning opportunity, not as a dangerous thing to be avoided

•  This is a close second.

Progress on safety coincides with learning from failure. This makes punishment and learning two mutually exclusive activities: Organizations can either learn from an accident or punish the individuals involved in it, but hardly do both at the same time. The reason is that punishment of individuals can protect false beliefs about basically safe systems, where humans are the least reliable components. Learning challenges and potentially changes the belief about what creates safety. Moreover, punishment emphasizes that failures are deviant, that they do not naturally belong in the organization...

SIDNEY W.A. DEKKER, TEN QUESTIONS ABOUT HUMAN ERROR: A NEW VIEW OF HUMAN FACTORS AND SYSTEM SAFETY (HUMAN FACTORS IN TRANSPORTATION)

•  Failure to do this causes the responsibility for a robust, fault tolerant, highly available infrastructure to always belong to the organization, not individuals.

•  Accept that failure is a normal part of the business

•  No blame post-mortems

Service Oriented Architectures

•  This is a little fuzzier, but essentially still true. They are converging towards it, if they don’t, almost certainly.

•  Service Orientation in the simplest sense!

•  Several practical benefits:

•  Easy to partition along failure domains

•  Easy to scale (if they are built right)

•  Easy to segregate work for development teams

•  Not really the “Enterprise SOA”, more the fuzzy, Web 2.0 SOA

Website

API

Database

Cultural allergies to things that make you slow

“The number 1 thing we can’t do is get in people’s way.”

- Phil Dibowitz, Facebook

•  You need to be empowering each other to move fast – that means trusting each other to do the right thing, building processes that support that trust, and refusing to settle for ponderous, byzantine process that creates safety through being sluggish.

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Addicted to data – about their internal performance and users perceptions

•  Metrics are collected obsessively •  Business and Service metrics

•  They try and make decisions on data rather than emotional arguments – they measure, evaluate, tweak, and iterate based on observable outcomes.

•  Stop arguing, start measuring.

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Understand the full scope of the transition

•  Successfully navigating this transition means changing the fundamental workflows by which the business operates

•  Software Development Life-cycles

•  Quality Assurance

•  Operations, Security and IT Life-cycles

•  Audit and Compliance controls

•  Business Owner relationships

•  How much or how little depends on the shape of the company - but they are all deeply impacted

Do not confuse existing structures for hard business requirements

•  Existing business structures and technology choices are reflections of the problems of their era

•  A fundamental shift in the problem necessitates allowing a re-consideration of those choices, both structural and technological

•  Example: •  3 teams: Operating Systems, Middleware, Application

Development

•  3 isolated solutions: Operating System installation and patch management, Middleware configuration management, and Application deployment

•  Are these choices being made because of solid technical reasons? Or faux business requirements?

Confine the blast radius, but don’t limit the magnitude of the explosion

•  With a scope of possible change that is so large, organizations cannot try and transform the entire organization at once

•  Doing so will lead to an emotionally loaded and painful bureaucratic failure

•  Reasonably so, because this approach is likely to be highly disruptive to gross productivity

•  Similarly, undertaking smaller changes organization wide often leads to mediocrity

•  This is great advice for incremental improvement

•  It naturally detracts from the huge benefits that come from allowing for whole-systems design - you’re not allowed to think holistically, only piece-meal

•  It leads to mediocre outcomes, if you want revolutionary results

•  Successful transitions happen in sections of the business

Take a whole-systems view of your technology platform

•  As the technology platform becomes the prime delivery vehicle for customer experience, it requires a whole-system perspective to design and implement

•  For example, choice of source code control system deeply impacts the available development workflows and continuous integration platform, which can impact asset creation and storage, which can impact production deployment methodologies, which impact audit and remediation, etc.

•  They think about the holistic workflow and business process they want to engender - then select tools to implement, and re-enforce, that process

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Re-enforce culture with technology, and vice versa

Tooling is culture institutionalized

•  Attempting to change how a business operates culturally with the same tools and processes that enforced the previous culture leads to worse results than doing nothing at all

•  Consider the cultural traits you want to engender or discourage, and build a technology platform the enforces those considerations

Every success story I found shared these traits

Every failure lacked one or more of them.

I have given you bad advice, and I am sorry.

•  Tools don’t matter, culture does •  Only true if you understand the tools and the culture

•  The tools matter as much as the culture – in a broken culture with a desire to change, the tooling can often lead the way to cultural changes easier than starting with big picture human change.

•  Start small and wide •  Great advice for incremental improvement. Find the bottlenecks. Fix them.

•  But if your goal is revolutionary – if you can’t close your eyes and see the future clearly, with the path intact – this leads to a slow, agonizing journey to mediocre results.

•  You can bring your executives along •  You can do this if you don’t want revolutionary change.

•  But this is heavy stuff – business wide, strategy changing, global economics stuff. If they don’t understand or agree, you are doing the business a disservice by shoving it down their throat

•  They’ll be happier drifting slowly into failure with incremental improvements.

You are the right people to transform your business

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Your skills increasingly are the business

Your knowledge is the critical knowledge

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