Category: Technology

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DevOps Enterprise Summit – London 2017

#DOES17

I had the privilege of attending and speaking again at this years DevOps Enterprise Summit in London at Queen Elizabeth II Centre across the street from Westminster Abby and Big Ben. The conference was attended by nearly 700 transformative leaders from companies and organization across the UK and the rest of Europe:  Hiscox, ITV, Barclays, Hearst, Jaguar Land Rover, Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Northrop Grumman, easyJet, Capital One, UK Ministry of Justice, ING, Swisscom, Lockheed Martin and more.

The speakers’ slide decks and videos of their talks are available now!

Great talk by Chris Hill (Jaguar Land Rover) and a great quote…

I love this quote from Suzette Johnson (Northrop Grumman) – an example of a good leader empowering the team:

Jonathan Smart (Barclays) had several great points, including this courageous quote on challenges along the journey:

I love this quote from Jonathan Fletcher’s (Hiscox) talk:

Creating Digital Magic

I was honored to speak again and talk about our DevOps journey at Disney.

Even though I wasn’t able to record my presentation, TheNewStack provided a great write-up of my talk: https://thenewstack.io/magic-behind-disney-devops-experience/

https://twitter.com/DOES_EUR/status/871659037993119744
https://twitter.com/DOES_EUR/status/871661031734603776
https://twitter.com/DOES_EUR/status/871663760678813696
https://twitter.com/DOES_EUR/status/880077833023836160

Ask the Speakers

Great “Ask the Speakers” session with my new friends Jonathan Smart (Barclays) and Andrea Hirzle-Yager (Allianz Deutchland AG):

https://www.srepath.com/inside-disneys-site-reliability-engineering-practice/

And…

The best part of this years trip to London?  Yes, an amazing journey through time and space with my sweetie…

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A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

Book Review

A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility
by Mark Schwartz

This should be required reading for all technology and business leaders who are serious about digital transformation.  This book takes you on a provocative, fun and comprehensive tour of the key areas that will promote and ignite digital empowering agility, creativity, learning, community and collaboration.

This book may be about taking a seat, but this is no time to be sitting still!   IT leaders will be convinced that their job is now about incentivizing and inspiring courage, passion and technical excellence in service of business objectives rather than blindly servicing requirements. You will even find practical advice on how to deal with projects, scope creep, IT assets (what the author calls Enterprise Architecture), governance, security, risk management, quality, and shadow IT.

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DevOps Enterprise Summit 2016 – San Francisco

The 2016 edition of the San Francisco based DevOps Enterprise Summit underscored the momentum and scale of the DevOps movement across the industry.  The summit saw record level attendance and phenomenal presentations from established DevOps luminaries, notable DevOps transformational companies as well as many new companies.

“We are at our best when we are helping each other, serving each other, and making a positive difference” – Jason Cox, Disney

Articles related to DOES 16:

https://blog.chef.io/2016/11/21/chef-devops-enterprise-summit/

DevOps Chat: Gene Kim on The DevOps Handbook and DevOps Enterprise Summit

https://stackstorm.com/2016/12/15/dimension-data-devops-beyond-deployment/

https://stackstorm.com/2017/01/24/innovation-at-dimension-data-event-driven-automation/

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Thinking Environments

Transformational technology leaders from many companies across the world assembled at the 2016 DevOps Enterprise Forum to discuss DevOps practices, challenges and best-known methods to help our organizations and our community succeed.

Along with several other leaders, I had the privilege of helping put together a guidance document on DevOps Organizational Models to accelerate business and empower workers. In this free publication by IT Revolution, we take a look at how and why organizations are structured, examine which have characteristics that promote or impede business enabling DevOps practices, and take a deep dive into four different models that began to surface during our research:  (1) the traditional functional silo hierarchy, (2) the matrix model, (3) the product platform model and the (X) adaptive organization model.

Download PDF Here

Authors

  • Mark Schwartz, CIO, US Citizenship and Immigration Services
  • Jason Cox, Director, Systems Engineering, The Walt Disney Company
  • Jonathan Snyder, Sr. Manager, Service Deployment & Quality, Adobe Systems
  • Mark Rendell, Principal Director, Accenture
  • Chivas Nambiar, Director Systems Engineering, Verizon
  • Mustafa Kapadia, NA DevOps Service Line Leader, IBM

More DevOps guidance documents can be found here: http://itrevolution.com/devops_enterprise_forum_guidance

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DevOps Handbook

devopshandbookDevOps Handbook: 
How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

Authors: Gene Kim,  Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and  John Willis
Foreword by John Allspaw

These notable DevOps luminaries provide a comprehensive definition, patterns and guidance on implementing business winning DevOps culture and practices within your your organization.  Beyond just looking at successful DevOps principles from “unicorn” companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Etsy, and Netflix, the authors provide several practical examples and case studies where these same practices are helping traditional enterprise companies like Target, Nordstrom, Raytheon, Nationwide Insurance, CSG, Capital One, and Disney.

The handbook captures several quotes from industry practitioners as well as unpack patterns that help promote increased velocity, feedback and experimentation and learning.

http://itrevolution.com/citations-devops-handbook/

wordcloud-devops-handbook

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DevOps Enterprise Summit – London 2016

I once again had the privilege of attending the DevOps Enterprise Summit.  This time it was in the U.K. at the Hilton Metropole.  I was impressed with the representation and talks from companies and organization across the UK and the rest of Europe:  SAP, ITV, Hiscox, ING, Barclays, HMRC, Zurich, and many more.

Themes that I picked up from these DevOps leaders:

  • People – Its all about People – empathy, org change, transformation
  • Speed – Continuous Integration and Delivery
  • Quality – Investment in DevOps practices often results in higher quality output
  • Agility – Microservices and Flexible Infrastructure
  • Security – Everyone’s responsibility
  • Business – Focus on Product vs. Project with integration with business in transformation (BizDevOps?)

I was honored to speak again and talk about our DevOps journey at Disney.

Jason Cox DOES16 London

Even though I wasn’t able to record my presentation, ComputerWorld UK provided a great write-up of my talk, and even gave me a new title! 🙂

https://twitter.com/DOESsummitEU/status/749000157136650241

There was considerable interest in our journey to DevOps, especially our transition from Operation Specialist to embedded Systems Engineers.

Other Quotes

“If technology is done well it looks like magic”

https://twitter.com/tumble_b/status/748460191935500288

References

Systems strategy chief Jason Cox details Disney’s devops journey – ComputerWorld UK

Tips for DevOps Success from DOES 2016 – ComputerWorld UK

DevOps Across the Pond – London Reprise – ITproPortal

Overcoming the scale-up challenge of enterprise DevOps adoption – ComputerWeekly.com

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The Art of Business Value

art-of-biz-valueA review of The Art of Business Value by Mark Schwartz

Business value, the north star of Agile, Lean and DevOps champions, is often more difficult to determine than one would imagine. This book takes the reader on a journey to discover that value while along the way, creating helpful mental models, challenging preconceived notions and proposing some creative ways to transform an organization.

The author does a great treatment of ROI (Return on Investment – does anyone ever really measure that?), NPV (Net Present Value), MVA (Market Value Added) and SVA (Shareholder Value Added). I especially enjoyed the humorous practical example that revealed a surprising truth that acquiring an MBA can easily have a negative NPV (in other words, a bad investment!) So save your money and pay attention to the author’s “four-paragraph MBA” (p. 20) that unpacks the main two principles learned in an MBA: 1) There is time value of money and 2) A business venture needs a sustainable competitive advantage.

Legacy IT architecture and bureaucracy are often considered negatives and obstacles to progressive competitive relevance but the author brings a refreshing perspective on the “value” of that complex hairball of legacy and rules and the right way to polish and transform them.

On Agile…

“The purpose of an Agile team is to self-organize and meet the underlying business need in the best way possible, often by cutting through the bureaucracy.” (p 55)

On DevOps…

“The DevOps model…looks to break down the silos that have resulted from technical specialization over the last few decades. But the DevOps spirit goes further looking to eliminate the conflicting incentives of organizational silos and the inhumane behaviors that can result from those conflicting incentives.” (p 48)

On Bureaucracy…

“Bureaucracy delivers business value. Just sometimes not enough.” (p 59)
…”developers are bureaucrats by nature. We have a tendency to solve problems by creating standard processes rather than by relying on human judgment.” (p 54)
“The pipeline is an automated bureaucracy: it applies its rules in a rigorous, unemotional way, sine ira et studio. That does not mean that the software development process is unemotional; it means that the tools are unemotional and the passion is brought to the process by the people.” (p 105)

And on Business Value…

“Business value is a hypothesis held by the organization’s leadership as to what will best accomplish the organization’s ultimate goals or desired outcomes.” (p 90)

I highly recommend this book to IT leaders, digital executives, strategic managers, and anyone seeking to make their organization more agile, effective, relevant, competitive and humane.

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Docker + Mesos + Marathon in AWS EC2

I wanted to see if I could get a Docker + Mesos + Marathon platform up and running quickly in AWS EC2 using t2.micro instances.  I found this great article by Gar (@gargar454) where he has put all the components in docker containers and provides a simple  tutorial which I paste below with some minor edits:

Create a Docker Host on EC2

Create your EC2 instances (Amazon AMI t2.micro will work), set it up in your private VPC and auto-assign a public IP so you can test.  You will need to open TCP ports 5050 and 8080 in  your security group from your workstation if you want to see the Mesos and Marathon UIs.   Run these commands to set up a docker host:

sudo yum update -y
sudo yum install -y docker
sudo service docker start
# grant ec2-user ability to run docker commands without sudo
sudo usermod -a -G docker ec2-user
# you must exist to refresh user rights
exit
  1. Export out the local host’s IP 
    • HOST_IP=`wget -qO- http://instance-data/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4`
  2. Start Zookeeper 
    docker run -d \
-p 2181:2181 \
-p 2888:2888 \
-p 3888:3888 \
garland/zookeeper
  3. Start Mesos Master 
    docker run --net="host" \
-p 5050:5050 \
-e "MESOS_HOSTNAME=${HOST_IP}" \
-e "MESOS_IP=${HOST_IP}" \
-e "MESOS_ZK=zk://${HOST_IP}:2181/mesos" \
-e "MESOS_PORT=5050" \
-e "MESOS_LOG_DIR=/var/log/mesos" \
-e "MESOS_QUORUM=1" \
-e "MESOS_REGISTRY=in_memory" \
-e "MESOS_WORK_DIR=/var/lib/mesos" \
-d \
garland/mesosphere-docker-mesos-master
  4. Start Marathon 
    docker run \
-d \
-p 8080:8080 \
garland/mesosphere-docker-marathon --master zk://${HOST_IP}:2181/mesos --zk zk://${HOST_IP}:2181/marathon
  5. Start Mesos Slave in a container 
    docker run -d \
--name mesos_slave_1 \
--entrypoint="mesos-slave" \
-e "MESOS_MASTER=zk://${HOST_IP}:2181/mesos" \
-e "MESOS_LOG_DIR=/var/log/mesos" \
-e "MESOS_LOGGING_LEVEL=INFO" \
garland/mesosphere-docker-mesos-master:latest
  6. Goto the Mesos & Marathon Web pages 
    # You can find your EC2 instance public IP address with:
wget -qO- http://instance-data/latest/meta-data/public-ipv4

    Mesos Web Page

  7. http://<public-ip>:5050

Marathon Web Page

http://<public-ip>:8080

Create an App (+ New App button) on the Marathon page to see the task get assigned to a Mesos slave and executed.

Marathon New App - test1

Log in to the slave container and watch the file grow:

docker exec -it mesos_slave_1 /bin/bash

tail -f /tmp/running.out
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AppleTV Development – OpenSSL and libcurl

In doing development for the new AppleTV, I was unable to find a cross compiled version of OpenSSL and cURL (libcurl) to use for my project.   I found a helpful OpenSSL script (here) that addressed some the unique tvOS challenges (e.g. fork() is not available) and used that build script to construct an libcurl build script.

The following repo contains scripts to build OpenSSL and cURL (libcurl) for OS X, iOS and tvOS with Bitcode enabled for iOS, tvOS. It includes the required patching for tvOS to not use fork(). This requires Xcode7.1b or later for the tvOS SDK.

https://github.com/jasonacox/Build-OpenSSL-cURL

 

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DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015

It was great to attend the DevOps Enterprise Summit again this year. The 2015 edition saw more than double the number of attendees of the 2014 conference with presentations from companies all over the world. There is definitely a feeling that DevOps is awakening across the enterprise.

I had the privilege of presenting again on Disney’s Journey,
“Disney DevOps – The Enterprise Awakens.”

Fellow DevOps Avengers from all over the world converged to swap stories, share new insight, technology and encourage each other to keep moving forward as the Force of positive change in our various industries.

DevOps Enterprise | The Agile, Continuous Delivery and DevOps Transformation Summit http://devopsenterprise.io

Some great reviews and observations:

Impressions from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015

Gene Kim and Others Share What DevOps is Really “All About”

Impressions from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015 – Micro Hering – Accenture

Infoworld – Gene Kim explains the joy of DevOps …

Selection of favorite quotes:

  • “If you name your servers and treat them like pets they all develop individual personalities.” – @jasonacox
  • “Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.” – Walt Disney
  • “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” –@jasonacox
  • “Believe in what you do, and make a difference” – @jasonacox