Continuous Lifecycle London

As I’ve just updated my Pelican relapse theme, thought I’d better post something.

I was lucky enough to attend the Continuous Lifecycle London conference recently, a great mix of talks on the culture, practices and technology of devops and continuous delivery at scale, all of which I find fascinating. I’ve always been lucky enough to work across the entire process of designing, implementing and deploying interesting software and hardware products. Working on a cloud-native software-as-a-service platform, it’s great to be able to use good software practices to codify, version control, test and deploy everything; software, infrastructure, network, security and even compliance. A long way from burning custom DVDs, cabling racks or flashing firmware!

The points that seemed to resonate most for me were:-

• the more you can automate and the faster you can deploy, the more reliable your application can become and the quicker you can respond to feedback or issues.
• if part of your deployment process is painful, do it much more often and automate it.
• automating your entire deployment pipeline can be hard and laborious, but given how much value it can bring it is worth the investment.

While at SpatialBuzz we already have an effective release process and automated deployment (our current record is eleven deployments to production in one day) there is always more to automate and optimise. As we work towards containerising our application and moving to an orchestrated container cluster, it really is an exciting time to be in software development (something I’m happy to still be saying after all these years).

As I work my way through Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Dave Farley, I’ll leave you with the video of the conference keynote.

Posted Tue 31 May '16 in DevOps (Conference)