What makes Continuous Delivery easy and what makes it hard? How much impact do your tech and architectural choices have on it? Should you start with a .Net monolith or go-lang microservices? This session shares lessons learnt by two teams, with very different tech and architectures, but who both were successful in their continuous delivery journey. Speaker: Lyndsay Prewer Lyndsay is an agile delivery consultant with over 20 years' experience of helping individuals, teams and organisations improve their software delivery. He’s currently working with Equal Experts, at a variety of public and private sector clients.

2. simple software solutions to big business problems.
Making Software. Better.
@EqualExperts
Smoothing the Continuous Delivery path
A tale of two architectures

3. © Equal Experts UK Ltd 2020
@EqualExperts
Continuous Delivery in donuts
3
Fast Feedback
Risk Reduction
Satisfied
customer

4. © Equal Experts UK Ltd 2020
@EqualExperts
There is no (CD) silver bullet
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● >30 deploys / day
● >2 billion page views / month
● 1 (javascript) monorepo
https://bit.ly/2BKuq5S
● >1000 deploys / day
● ~2 billion requests per day
● >600 java microservices
https://bit.ly/2Uq5My8

5. © Equal Experts UK Ltd 2020
@EqualExperts
There is no (CD) silver bullet
5
● Weekly deployments
● ~100M visits / day
● 2 monoliths (C#, C++)
● Multiple deploys / day
● Recent peak of ~1000 RPS
● ~1000 microservices (Scala)
C++ C#
Private Sector Org. UK Government Org.

6. © Equal Experts UK Ltd 2020
@EqualExperts
Practices for Smoothing the Continuous Delivery path
6
Practices for
Microservices
Practices
For Monoliths
Universal
Practices
*M 𝝁

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@EqualExperts 7
Practice #0 - Start with the best people you can hire
*

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● What’s the smallest thing we
can release to Production?
● How do we evolve Production
behaviour
● Is this code change safe to go to
Production today?
8
Practice #1 - Think about Production, all the time
*

9. © Equal Experts UK Ltd 2020
@EqualExperts 9
▪ Work board right to left
▪ What was deployed yesterday?
▪ What will be deployed today?
Practice #1 - Think about Production, all the time
- Example: Production focused Standups
*

10. © Equal Experts UK Ltd 2020
@EqualExperts
Practice #2 - Make ‘ilities’ continuous activities, not phases
10
Product
Owner
Define
Dev
Build
QA
Explore
Web Ops
Deploy
Quality, Security, Operability, ...
*

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Practice #3 - Learn from Production incidents
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http://www.airliners.net/photo/uk-air-force/british-aerospace-hawk-t1-astra/949077

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Practice #3 - Learn from Production incidents - 5 why’s
- Run Blameless Post Mortems
12
M
“Adaptability and learning.
- We learn through honest,
blameless reflection on lessons
and surprises.
- We believe that traditional root
cause analysis makes learning
from mistakes difficult.
http://sec.edgar-online.com/etsy-inc/s-1a-securities-registration-statement/2015/04/14/section20.aspx

13. © Equal Experts UK Ltd 2020
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Practice #3 - Learn from Production incidents
- Run Blameless Post Mortems
13
M
https://extfiles.etsy.com/DebriefingFacilitationGuide.pdf Structure and Preparation
● Familiarize Yourself With the Timeline
in Advance
● Unearth More Objective and Subjective
Data
● Talking to the People Who Would
Usually Be Blamed Is Really Important
● Come up With Some Initial Questions

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Practice #4 - Automate release notes
14
M
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spot_the_difference.png

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Practice #4 - Automate release notes
15
M

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Practice #4 - Automate release notes
16
Source control
system
Login Reporting
Payments
API’s
Agile Project
Management Tool
Features
Stories
Tasks
Defects
Story 123
State, areas, authors
...
Defect 789
State, areas, authors
...
Untracked work
Areas, authors
...
Release note
generator
Production
Version
Candidate
Version
M

17. © Equal Experts UK Ltd 2020
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Practice #5 - Teams own their own microservices
17
𝝁
Legacy and Third Party Systems
~1000 microservices
Xm BusinessesXXm Individuals
x130 Transaction types
Back-ends
Front-ends / APIs

18. © Equal Experts UK Ltd 2020
@EqualExperts
Practice #5 - Teams own their own microservices
18
𝝁
Legacy and Third Party Systems
Xm BusinessesXXm Individuals
x130 Transaction types
Cat
Services
Dog
Services
Tiger
Services
Team Tools
Service
Operation
Platform
Security
Auditing
Build &
Deploy
Infra-
structure
Telemetry
60 service teams
7 platform teams

19. © Equal Experts UK Ltd 2020
@EqualExperts
Practice #5 - Teams own their own microservices
19
“You build it, you run it” -
Werner Vogels
Amazon CTO
https://goo.gl/DyfeOf
𝝁
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jobook/4751509167/

20. © Equal Experts UK Ltd 2020
@EqualExperts
Practice #6 - Play nicely with others (services, APIs, libraries)
20
𝝁
http://www.asterix-obelix.nl/images/albums/characters/c-fighting.gif

21. © Equal Experts UK Ltd 2020
@EqualExperts 21
Production
Staging
QA
Dev
Sharing
through
caring
𝝁Practice #6 - Play nicely with others (services, APIs, libraries)

22. © Equal Experts UK Ltd 2020
@EqualExperts
Practices for Smoothing the Continuous Delivery path
22
0. Start with the best people
you can hire
1. Think about Production,
all the time
2. Make ‘ilities continuous
activities, not phases
3. Learn from Production
incidents
4. Automate release notes
5. Teams own their own
microservices
6. Play nicely with others
(services, APIs, etc)
*
M 𝝁