A story on how to develop modern age systems and help business to reach their goals

1. HAUFE‘S TECH STRATEGY IN PRACTICE
Marco Seifried
Lead Platform Architect
@marcoseifried
marco.seifried@haufe-lexware.com
A story on how to develop modern age systems and help business to reach their goals

2. Haufe Group
Digital Media Group providing digital workplace and business
solutions
Online services for HR managers, accounting apps for the self-
employed, Internet portals for tax experts, online and offsite
trainings
Founded 1930, family owned still, now 1500 employees
Locations in Germany, Spain, Switzerland, US, China and Romania

3. WE NEED TO TRANSFORM OUR
BUSINESS
...
CONSTANTLY

4. EFFICIENCY IN
LEGACY BUINESS
SPEND MONEY
ON VALUE
SPEED TO MARKET GLOBALIZATION
DIGITALIZATION OF
BUSINESS MODELS
SPARKING
INNOVATION
CHALLENGES IN
TRANSFORMING
BUSINESS

5. HOW TO FOSTER INNOVATION?

6. Culture
StructureTechnology
ALIGNMENT & BALANCE

7. Values
• Values is what we value
• High Performance
• Freedom & Responsibility
• Context, not control
Skills
• Curiosity
• Courage
• Passion
• Selflessness
A must read slidedeck: http://de.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

8. Technical Strategy
@Haufe

9. BASELINE – ARCHITECTURAL PRINCIPLES
Business value over technical strategy
Strategic goals over project-specific benefits
Composability over silos
Shared services over specific-purpose implementations
Evolutionary refinement over pursuit of initial perfection
Design for obsoleteness over building for eternity
Good enough over best of breed
Declarative processes over implicit knowledge
Data over opinion

11. 24.01.2017 11
MICROSERVICES
• Vertical Decomposition
• Shared Nothing Architecture
• Independent Deployable, Scalable and Evolvable
• Do One Thing and Do One Thing Well

12. AUTOMATE YOUR ECOSYSTEM
• Build
• Infrastructure as Code -> git
• Pipelines -> go.cd, Jenkins
• Docker (container, docker compose), Kubernetes, Consul
• Docker Registry
• Deploy
• Feature Flags
• Blue / Green
• Rolling Updates
• Immutable Infrastructure
• Test
• martinfowler.com/articles/microservice-testing

13. AUTOMATE YOUR ECOSYSTEM
• Operate
• Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Amazon / Azure Container Service, Rancher
• Autoscaling ?
• Service Discovery external (AWS Elastic Loadbalancer) & internal (Kubernetes)
• Monitor, Logging, Reporting
• Health endpoints per service
• Central Log Management -> fluentd, Graylog
• Monitor -> Grafana, Graphite, InfluxDB,
Prometheus

14. COMBINE THAT WITH…
• Cloud to make use of IaaS, PaaS & SaaS
• Watch out: Lock-in vc. benefits of offerings
• Docker as base to be independent
• Do it yourself where there is unique business value
• Don‘t just ‚lift & shift‘ – think about cloud architecture
• APIs
• to decouple systems / microservices
• outside-in design: don‘t expose what you have, expose what your customer needs
• Self serviced

15. LAST BUT NOT LEAST - PRODUCT TEAMS
• Responsible
• Empowered
• Cross functional
• DevOps
• Conway‘s Law
Spotify is a prime example:
http://www.full-stackagile.com/2016/02/14/team-organisation-squads-chapters-tribes-and-guilds/

16. Some real life experience

17. Introducing – Our Service Platform
http://fineartamerica.com/featured/big-ball-from-a-cable-twisted-pair-aleksandr-volkov.html
- 5 to 10 days to deploy
- 2 releases a year
- Months to test
- White box testing
- Deployed on hosted hardware
- test != prod
- Not an ESB, but worse
- Serves a wide range of services
from a single entity

18. Lets start simple and extract (just) User Management
9 months later - it was a complete failure
- Lost test coverage (Remember white box
testing?)
- Scope creep (lets fix all the things which
bugged us)
- Project complexity grew out of control (Leading
Indicator: “We just need X more developers”)
- Agile became frAgile
- Team morale and spirit were destroyed

19. Stabilize Optimize Transform
The 3 Stages of Lean Transformation

20. So we reset the project (but kept the team)
• Strictly time-boxed phases (3 months)
• Additional focus on team culture, attitudes, and challenge
• Start with the basics – Automation, to gain time for the more valuable features
• Result: Time to deploy from 5-10 days to 30 min
• Infrastructure as Code (Docker)
• Rapid deployment via Cloud (Azure)
• Build and deployment automation through Go.CD
• Inmutable Server

21. Next up: Haufe Publishing System
• Haufe‘s factory: Producing our content
• Monolithic application, grown over the years
• Max 2 releases per year

22. Work @Haufe karriere.haufe-lexware.com/en/
.
You’re full of energy, looking for a challenge and willing to learn on the job?
Great! We give you space to mobilize that energy and channel it into exciting projects.
What we offer: Basic Information:
Internships 1 – 6 month(s), 39 hrs per week
Work Semesters max. 20 hrs per week/semester
max. 40 hrs per week /holiday
Traineeships esp. Sales, Marketing, Product and Project
management
12 -14 months, full time
Bachelor- / Master Thesis
Positions Software Developer, - Architect, Tester,
Project Manager

23. Find out more.
For job opportunities check out: karriere.haufe-lexware.com/en/
For daily news about us, our teams, twitter.com/HG_Jobs
our work and jobs follow us: www.linkedin.com/company/haufe-gruppe
www.xing.com/company/haufe-gruppe
See what other
people have to say about us: www.kununu.com/de/haufe-gruppe
Technical blog, GitHub, Twitter: dev.haufe.com
github.com/Haufe-Lexware
@HaufeDev
Get in contact: YoungTalents@haufe-lexware.com

24. Further information on our work and projects
Project example from this deck dev.haufe.com/the-automated-monolith
OSS API Mgnt wicked.haufe.io
Docker github.com/Haufe-Lexware/docker-style-guide
API Styleguide github.com/Haufe-Lexware/api-style-guide
Slideshare www.slideshare.net/HaufeDev

25. Bedtime reading
@danielbryantuk