Last week I had the honour to speak about ChatOps at Continuous Lifecycle conference in London. The conference is organised by The Register and heise Developer and is dedicated to all things DevOps and Continuous Software Delivery. There were 2 days of talks and one day of workshops. Regretfully I couldn’t attend the last day, but I heard some of the workshops were really great.
The Venue
The venue was great! Situated right in the historical centre of London city, a few steps away from Big Ben, the QEII Center has a breathtaking view and a lot of space. The talks took place in 3 rooms : one large auditorium and 2 — smaller ones. It is quite hard to predict which talks will attract the most audience and it was hit and miss this time around too. Some talks were over-crowded while others felt a bit empty.
Between the talks everybody gathered in the recreation area to collect merchandise from the sponsors’ stands and enjoy coffe and refreshments.
The Audience
The pariticipants were mostly engineers, architects and engineering managers. As it happens too often in DevOps gatherings— the business folks were relatively few. Which is a pity — because DevOps and CI/CD is a clear business advantage based on better tech and process optimization. The sad part is the techies understand it, but the business people still too often fail to see the connection.
The Talks
Beside the keynotes (I only attended the first one) there were 3 tracks running in parallel. I had a chance to attend a few selected ones in between networking, mentally preparing for my talk and relaxing afterwards.
The keynote
The opening keynote was delivered by Dave Farley — the author of the canonical ‘Continuous Delivery’ book. Dave is a great speaker. He was talking about the necessity of iterative and incremental approaches to software engineering while bringing some exciting examples from space exploration history. Still to me it felt a bit like he was recycling his own ideas. The book was published 7 years ago. At that time it was a very important work. It laid out all the concepts and practices many of us were applying (or at least trying to promote) in a clear and concise way. I myself have used many of the examples from the book to explain CI/CD to my managers and employees numerous times over the years. But time has passed and I feel we need to find new ways of bringing the message. I do realise many IT organisations are still far from real continuous delivery. Some still don’t feel the danger of not doing it, others are afraid of sacrificing quality for speed. But more or less everybody already knows the theory behind it. Small batches, process automation, trunk-based development, integrated systems etc. It’s the implementation of these ideas that organisations are struggling with. The reasons for that are manyfold — politics, low trust, inertia, stress, burnout and lack of motivation. And of course the ever growing tool sprawl. What people really want to hear today is how to navigate this new reality. Practical advices on where to start, what to measure and how to communicate about it. Not the beaten story of agile software delivery and how it’s better than other methodologies.
The War Stories
Thankfully there was no lack of both success and failure stories and practical tips. There were some great talks on how to do deployments correctly, stories of successful container adoption and also Sarah Wells’ excellent presentation of the methodologies for influencing and coordinating the behaviours of distributed autonomous teams.
Focus on Security
As I already said — quite naturally not all the talks got the same level of interest. Still I think I noticed a certain trend — the talks dedicated to security attracted the largest crowd. Which is in itself very interesting. Security wasn’t traditionally on the priority list of DevOps-oriented organisations. Agility, quality, reliability — yes. Security — maybe later.
The disconnect was so obvious that some folks even called for adding the InfoSec professionals into the loop while inventing such clumsy terms as DevOpSec or DevSecOps.
But now it looks lke there’s a change in focus. New deployment and orchestration technologies are bringing new challenges and we suddenly see the DevOps enablers looking for answers to some hard questions that InfoSec is asking. No wonder all the talks on security I atteneded got a lot of attention. Lianping Chen’s presentation was focused on securing our CI/CD pipeline, while Dr. Phil Winder provided a great overview of container security best practices with a live demo and quite a few laughs. And there was also Jordan Taylor’s courageous live demo of using Hashicorp Vault for secret storage.
As a side note — if you’re serious about your web application and API security — you should definitely look at beame.io — they have some great tech for easy provisioning of SSL certificates in large volumes.
And for InfoSec professionals looking to get a grip on container technologies here’s a seminar we’ve recently developed : https://otomato.link/otomato/training/docker-for-information-security-professionals/
ChatOps
My talk was dedicated to the subject that I’ve been passionate about for the last couple of years — ChatOps. The slides are already online, but they are just illustrating the ideas I was describing so it’s better to wait until the video gets edited and uploaded (yes, I’m impatient too). In fact — while preparing for the talk I’ve laid out most of my thoughts in writing and I’m now thinking of converting that into a blog post. Hope to find some time for editing in the upcoming days. And if you’d like some help or advice enabling ChatOps at your company – drop us a line at contact@otomato.link
There was another talk somehow related to the topic at the conference. Job van der Voort — GitLab’s product marketing manager — described what he calls ‘Conversational Development’ — “a natural evolution of software development that carries a conversation across functional groups throughout the development process.” GitLab is a 100% remote working company and according to Job, this mode of operation allows them to be effective and ensure good communication across all teams.
GitLab Dinner
At the end of the first day all the speakers got an invitation to a dinner organised by GitlLab. There were no sales pitches — only good food and a great opportunity to talk to colleagues from all across Europe. Many thanks go to Richard and Job from GitLab for hosting the event. BTW — I just discovered that Job is coming to Israel and will be speaking at a meetup organised by our friends and partners — the great ALMToolBox. If you’re in Israel — it’s a great chance to learn more about GitLab and enjoy some pizza and beer on the 34th floor of Electra Tower. I’ll be there.