WORKSHOP - Software Releasability: Scaling Continuous Delivery

In this workshop, we explain proven patterns and practical techniques for ensuring our software is releasable at all times, with a delivery system that is resilient to disasters, scalable and with minimum time to recover from errors.

That means we are treating our pipelines as a production-grade system, and caring about the quality of this system with the same rigor. We want to continuously ensure not only that the pipeline system serves its core purpose of safely progressing our client-facing systems from commit to production, but also ensure that the pipeline's performance, reliability, and operability are of high standard.

In practice, this means our delivery system needs to follow the same good practices as our software, such as the ability to test (non-trivial) changes to the pipeline in isolation, avoid regressions, decouple its architecture, reduce the blast radius of failures, version control our configuration (pipeline-as-code), aggregated logging, monitoring, and measuring performance.

Attendees will gain practical experience of techniques to treat our delivery chain as a first class citizen in our value stream, including testing, scaling and monitoring our delivery system.

Workshop ToC

• Why Software Releasability
• Treat your pipeline as a production system
• Treat your pipeline as a value stream map
• Monitor performance

Note: the workshop will not cover specific aspects such as comparing build, test or deployment tools, or how to set up feature flags.

Technical requirements

• Participants are required to bring their own laptop for the exercises.

You will need to have Docker Community Edition installed on your laptop:

https://www.docker.com/community-edition#/download

Note that knowledge of how to use Docker is not required. But we will use containers to simplify/accelerate the setup of the exercises.

• Participants are expected to already have practical experience with a Continuous Delivery orchestration tool (e.g. Jenkins, Visual Studio Team Services, GoCD, TravisCI, Concourse, etc).

The workshop will not cover introductory concepts of what is Continuous Delivery or a deployment pipeline, for example.

Manuel Pais is an independent DevOps and Delivery Consultant, focused on teams and flow. Manuel has helped large organizations in finance, legal, and manufacturing adopt test automation and continuous delivery, as well as understand DevOps from both technical and human perspectives. He has worked with a wide range of industries (banking, telecom, legal, manufacturing, defense and aviation). Co-author of the upcoming book Team Guide to Software Releasability and co-curator of the well-known DevOps team topologies patterns. Co-founder of DevOps Lisbon meetup. Blogs @medium.