Track: DevOps & DevEx: Remove Friction, Ship Code, Add Value

10:35am - 11:25am

Progressive Delivery

An introduction to Progressive Delivery: a basket of skills and technologies for modern software development, testing and deployment: including canarying, Feature Flags, Blue Green deployments and A/B testing at scale. We're seeing advances in approaches to application and service delivery, where deploying a service no longer means releasing it. How can we safely debug in production? Technologies like Kubernetes and Istio bring new management challenges, but also opportunities – service mesh approaches can enable a lot more sophistication in routing of new application functions to particular user communities, managing and mitigating the blast ratio of a service. CI/CD is the basis of everything good in modern software development but there are some new aspects and practices that we don’t currently have a name for. This talk will includes lessons from Microsoft, Cloudflare, Sumo Logic and Target.

11:50am - 12:40pm

Cloud Native CI/CD with Jenkins X and Knative Pipelines

More and more teams are deploying cloud native applications on kubernetes, placing new demands on engineers who want to deploy and test easily during their development workflow. Traditional CI/CD systems haven’t been designed for cloud native environments and need to evolve. Jenkins X is a cloud native CI/CD platform that has done just that, integrating tools in the kubernetes ecosystem into an opinionated system for CI/CD as code.

In this talk we’ll explain the CI/CD challenges in a cloud native landscape, and show how Jenkins X rises to them by leveraging open source cloud native technologies like Knative Pipelines. We’ll demo a GitOps based Jenkins X workflow, showing how simple Jenkins X makes it for developers to stage and deploy changes on demand.

1:40pm - 2:30pm

Who Broke Prod? - Growing Teams Who Can Fail Without Fear

In a world where we can deploy software and infrastructure changes within seconds, it’s reasonably easy to break stuff. When the inevitable bad stuff happens, humans tend to look for someone to blame. Research has shown that the most productive teams are those who don’t have to fear blame. On high-performing teams, people feel safe taking risks, making mistakes, and learning from them – so how do you build an environment where it’s OK to fail? In this talk we’ll explore the factors that contribute to psychological safety on a delivery team. We’ll look at some of the steps that leaders and team members can take to foster a culture of blameless failure that encourages innovation and collaboration. We’ll look at soft-skills, CI/CD practices, retrospective processes and tooling that can help you to build a culture of trust and ownership within your own team.

2:55pm - 3:45pm

DevOps & DevEx Open Space

4:10pm - 5:00pm

Develop Hundreds of Kubernetes Services at Scale With Airbnb

You've already made the plunge to move to Kubernetes, and you feel pretty good about that. But why does it feel like it requires expert-level Kubernetes knowledge for engineers to get anything done?

 This talk will identify key problems that make out-of-the-box Kubernetes less friendly to developers, and strategies for addressing them, based on Airbnb’s experience empowering one thousand engineers to develop hundreds of Kubernetes services at scale.   This talk will focus primarily on four problem areas:   

1. Configuration: abstracting away kubernetse configration, generated services
2. Lifecycle: Versioning and refactoring configuration
3. Tooling: Creating and distributing opinionated kubectl and plugins
4. CI/CD: build and deploy process, and validating configuration 

5:25pm - 6:15pm

How to Tell Your Boss Story Points Are a Terrible Metric

By setting the wrong targets your boss can set your team up for failure and a lot of long, late nights or early mornings.

Metrics and targets in software engineering are designed to assist in the measurement of progress usually against a chargeable contract. But, the measures and metrics in each layer of a software organisation are different and the metrics at the interface between each layer can be misunderstood.

When a measure becomes an agreed metric, care needs to be taken that it doesn’t inadvertently become a target, which can result in unnatural behaviour, creating a myriad of unforeseen problems, because incentives are not aligned with the desired outcome.

This talk will look at the different measures commonly found in software development, what they’re used for, highlight the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of measuring progress versus productivity and how all metrics should ultimately relate to a desired business outcome.

Measurements are critical for ensuring that the development addresses the business problem is was designed to solve. We’ll share stories of what happened when the wrong thing got measured and offer some practical ways to help you, your team and of course your boss!