Coté's Weekly Wunderkammer
DevOps, monolithic architectures, craftsmanship – an unpublished interview
I’m too wordy when I reply to reporters. This is mostly true everywhere I produce content. I don’t like trite, simple answers. Brevity and clarity makes me suspicious, especially on topics I know well. As a consequence, I don’t think this interview by email was ever published.
What’s a DevOps advocate?
If you mean what I do, it means studying people and organizations who are trying trying to improve how they do software, summarizing all those, ongoing, into several different types of content, and then trying to help, advise, educate people on how they can improve how they do software. A loop of learning and then trying to teach, in a limited way. For example, I’m working on finish up a book that contains a lot of this stuff that I’ve found over the past couple of years.
What is the foundation of DevOps: automation, agility, tools, continuous or all of them?
Yes, those are the core tools. The traditional foundation is “CALMS” which means Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing. Ultimately, these are things any innovation-driven process follows, but they’re called out explicitly because traditional IT has lost its way and doesn’t usually focus on these common sense thing. A lot of what DevOps is trying to do is just get people to follow better software development and delivery practices…ones they should have been doing all along but got distracted from with outsourcing, SLAs, cost cutting, and the idea of treating IT like a service, or utility rather than an innovation engine for “the business.”
Anyhow, CALMS means:
- Culture – the norms, processes, and methodology IT follows. You want to shift from a project delivery culture to a product culture, from service management to innovation. Defining “culture,” let along how to change it and how to use it is slippery. I wrote up what I’ve figured out so far here.
- Automation – this is the easiest to understand of all the DevOps things. It means, to focus on automating as much as possible. If you find yourself manually doing some configuration or whatever, or relying on people opening a ticket to get something
- (Like a database, etc.), figure out how to automate that instead.
- Lean – software development has been borrowing a lot from Lean for the past 15 years. DevOps takes most all of it, but the key concepts it brings in are eliminated waste (effort spent that has “no value” to customers, in IT, often wait time for things like setting up servers and such) and working on incremental, more frequent (like weekly) releases rather than big, yearly releases.
- Measurement – DevOps, like agile, is actually very disciplined if done properly. In addition to monitoring your applications and such in production, in order to continuously improve, DevOps is interested in measuring metrics around process. How many bugs are in each release? How frequently do we deploy software? And so forth. The point is to use these measurements to indicate areas of improvement and figure out if you’re actually improving or not.
- Sharing – this was added after the initial four concepts. It’s straight forward and means that people across groups and even across organizations should share knowledge with each other. It also means, within organizations, having more unified teams of people rather than different groups that try to work with each other.
Today, we can ship every day. What impact for the teams and developers?
Shipping more frequently means you have more input on the usefulness of your software and it also adds much more stability and predictably into your software process. Because you’re shipping weekly, or daily, you can observe how people use your software and make very frequent changes to improve your software. There’s a loop of trying our a new feature, releasing it and observing how people use it, and then coming up with a new way to solve that problem better.
Stability and predictability are introduced because you establish a realistic rate of feature delivery each week. When you’re delivering each week, you quickly learn how much code (or features) you can do each week. This means that rather than having developers estimate how many features they can deliver in a year, for example, you learn how much they can actually deliver each week. Estimates are pretty much always wrong, and complete folly. But, once you calibrate and know how many features the team can deliver each week, they’re predictable and the overall process is more stable.
Monolithic’ architecture vs modular’ approach. Are we talking micro-service? Container?
Yes, a monolithic architecture implies software that’s made of many different parts, but that all depend strongly on each other. To be frank, it also means software that’s complex, poorly tested, and, thus, not well understood. “Monolith” is often used for “software I’m scared to change,” that is, “legacy software.” In contrast, if you’re fine to change software and don’t fear doing so, you just call it “software.”
A microservice architecture is the current approach to break up “monoliths” into more independent components, different services that evolve on their own but are composed together for an application. Buying a product online is a classic example. If you look at the product page, it could be composed of many different services: pictures of the product, figuring out the pricing for your region, checking inventory for the product, listing reviews, etc. A monolithic architecture would find all of that information all at once, in “one” piece of code. An application following a microservices architecture would treat all of these things as third party, not under your control services and compose the page from calling all those services.
To over simplify it, we used to call this idea “mashups” in the Web 2.0 era: pulling data from a lot of different sources and “mashing” that data up into a web page. All the rotating ads and suggested content you see on news sites are a metaphoric example as well: each of those components are pulled in from some other service rather than managed and collected together by the news site CMS. This is why the ads and suggested content are often awful, of course: there’s no editorial control over them.
Infra as Code? Another thing?
“Infrastructure as code” means using automation tools the building and configuring of servers (the software parts, not the hardware) and other “infrastructure” and then treating those automation workflows as if they were software code: you check them into version control and track them like a version of your application. This means that you can check out, for example, a version of the server you’re configuring and automatically create it. The point of doing this is get more visibility and control over that configuration by removing manual, human-driven configuring and such. Humans create errors, forget how things were done, have bad hair days, and otherwise foul things up. Computers don’t (unless those annoying humans tell them to).
For you, what is the ideal architecture?
An annoying, though accurate answer would be “it depends. I don’t really code anymore, so I couldn’t really say. Usually, you start with the minim needed and just add in more complex architectures as needed. That sounds like the opposite of architecture, but it’s worse to end up with something like all those giant, built out cities that end up having few people living in them.
Kanban, craftsmanship: friend or enemy of DevOps?
Kanban is used a lot in DevOps, maybe not fully. But, the idea of having cards that represent a small feature, a backlog that contains those cards ranked by some priority, and then allowing people to pull those cards and put them in columns marked something like “working on” and “complete” is used all the time.
I’m not sure what “craftsmanship” is in this context, but it it means perfecting things like some master furniture maker, most DevOps people would encourage you to instead “release” the cabinets more frequently to find out how they should be designed than assuming you knew what was needed and working on it all at once: maybe they want brutalist square legs instead of elegant rounded legs topped with a swan.
And, of course, if “craftsmanship” means “doing a good job and being conscious of how you’re evolving your trade,” well, everyone would say they do that, right? :)
Originally posted on cote.io.
Software Defined Talk #172: The Mainframe Strangler
I'm full of beans this episode:
There’s a new kubernetes, Oracle lay-offs, Zoom.US, and the problem with mainframe complainers.
Plus:
USB-C. Fuck that shit.
Don’t read the comments.
Don’t throw out the executives with the bathwater.
They’re using 1/24th of their ass
Sometime in the future, I am going to be awesome!
If I have a rock question I’ll ask you.
Things aren’t too expensive, you’re just not getting enough value from them.
Light a fire in an air-tight room. Outrun the bear.
In the Lisbon airport
A lone man in the security line slowly creeping around people, a sort of an aloof look on his face. He passes me on a turn when I go wide and he greases his way past, smoothly. He tries to pass an Asian girl, but she mutters something and he says some small noise like “OK” and stops. Same guy tries to put a big bag of Hotel soaps and shampoos through the X-ray machine and has to be called back as they divide up his bag.
There’s a similar type of old guy look walking around here where the guy has the top two or three buttons undone and kind of strolls around with his beer gut strolling with him. Regular Joe Cools of days past.
Early morning in the Warsaw airport
Guy walking into the bathroom, at Warsaw airport, early in the morning, 5:18am. I swear he has a little TV guide in the outside, mesh pocket of his backpack. Hopefully he studies that like a train table. Maybe he works in TV and actually needs to know the schedule.
This week's link
One Simple Way to Eliminate Distractions in a Board Meeting
The best board meetings are discussions and debates about the business yet many executive teams spent their time wanting to walk through hours of slides on how great they’re doing. Humans do much better when they’re participating than when they’re being lectured to. The most value you’ll get out of your board is when they’re speaking and offering you feedback and experiences from others companies in which they’re involved.
I recommend that executive teams send materials out 72 hours in advance. I recommend that CEOs do 1–1 calls with board members prior to the meeting to walk through the high-level financials. And I recommend that boards have 2–3 strategic topics that they consider during the in-person meeting. If you run your board this way you’ll maximize the time you have together as a group and keep your board engaged.
On the top layer there is rapid change. On the bottom, change happens at a glacial pace. It's this combination of everything, from seconds at the top, to millennia at the bottom, that give resilience to the system.
And:
A key concept to this is that each layer has to respect the pace of another.
Screen Time additions: "Downtime can be configured with a different schedule for each day of the week; A new toggle enables easily turning app limits on or off temporarily."
Screen Time is pretty good for kid control. It can always be better, though.
Oracle swings axe on cloud infrastructure corps amid possible bloodbath at Big Red
These US-based layoffs are part of a broad round of job cuts around the globe this month, said to range from 500 to 14,000 at the database giant. The biz employs about 140,000 worldwide.
As always, I love a Matt Levine email column. He's a master of the form.
With all the money sloshing around looking to find a home, startup funding might be a bit of a sellers market:
Venture capitalists are now relatively less in the business of choosing the best startups in which to invest, and relatively more in the business of getting the best startups to choose them as investors. Money is plentiful and good startups are relatively (relatively!) scarce, and so the startups can be picky. And venture capitalists are increasingly doing public relations to try to become famous, so that the startups that will become famous will choose them as investors. “Some firms are realizing, ‘Huh, maybe awareness doesn’t just magically grow on trees,’” says the founder of a public relations firm.
And once startups are public, investors get little control:
So here too the founders seem to have the power and the people writing the checks don’t. In private markets, investors have to demonstrate their merit to be allowed to invest. In public markets, anyone can invest, but they don’t really get any control over the company. Capital is plentiful, and the people with the companies just don’t have to do that much to cater to the people with the capital. I suppose it makes sense so many unicorns are, in Griffith’s words, “a financial sinkhole”: If you don’t have to be too solicitous of the people with the money, you might as well spend a lot of it.
Exploring the “Unknown Unknowns” in IT-enabled Digital Transformation Estimates
These low-ball estimates are sometimes provided by consultants working to get their foot in the door, or by executive sponsors working to gain approval for their programs. Excluding low-ball estimates, the primary cause of poor estimates tends to be a lack of experience and background of the leader.
Instagram Is Changing How You Shop
When you browse select posts from those brands, you’ll now see a blue “Checkout on Instagram” call-to-action. Click it, and you can select your size, color, billing and shipping details. Instagram will take an undisclosed cut of sales.
It's the new "As Seen on TV."
An impressive 72% of millennials are more likely to be loyal to a brand that responds to feedback on social media.
They don't want to use the phone. Who does really?
Google makes emails more dynamic with AMP for Email
With AMP for Email, those messages become interactive. That means you’ll be able to RSVP to an event right from the message, fill out a questionnaire, browse through a store’s inventory or respond to a comment — all without leaving your web-based email client.
Some of the companies that already support this new format are Booking.com, Despegar, Doodle, Ecwid, Freshworks, Nexxt, OYO Rooms, Pinterest and redBus. If you regularly get emails from these companies, then chances are you’ll receive an interactive email from them in the coming weeks.
Women more at risk of job automation
In 2017, ONS found 1.5 million roles in England were at risk of having elements of their tasks automated, including roles such as retail cashiers, manufacturing plant employees and waiting staff, many of which are more likely to be filled by women.
Oracle's Georges Saab on the Impact of Faster Java Releases
When the new six-month cadence was announced there was some talk about "release fatigue." Have you seen that in the Java community? It's sort of like asking, if your kids had Christmas twice a year, do you think they'd experience "Christmas fatigue?" The parents might, I guess. What I'm hearing people say now is that they are seeing so much evidence that updating to 9 and finding the move to 10 and 11 so smooth, they're excited about the new cadence and what's coming down the pike.
Dirty Little Secrets of your System Integrator: Why Companies Still Go Over Budget
File under:
- Enterprise computering considered difficult.
- Be careful what wish-contract for.
- Agility is expensive if your budget cycle is on years.
- Maybe hire your own people?
Strategy involves determining the company’s intent. Strategy is expressed in an understanding of the environment, an expression of ambition, decisions regarding the allocation of resources and plan of execution. Strategy provides a perspective on where and how the company will win from the inside out. Design entails understanding and expressing customer intent. Expressed in terms of persona’s, needs, journey maps, touchpoints and prototypes. Design provides a perspective on how and why customers win from the outside in.
The platform play: How to operate like a tech company
One of the global leading banks created about 30 platforms. One such platform was payments, which consisted of more than 60 applications that previously had been managed independently from each other. The top team decided to bring the 300-plus IT people working on development and maintenance of payments together with the corresponding people on the business side. Under joint business/IT leadership, this entity was empowered to move quickly on priority business initiatives, to modernize the IT structure, and to allocate the resources to make that happen.
The team shifted its working model and started running the payments platform as an internal business that served all the different parts of the bank (think payments as a service). This approach made it clear where to focus specific tech interventions: removal of nonstrategic IT applications; modernization and accelerated shift of the target applications into the cloud; connectivity to enable swapping solutions in or out easily; and, most important, a major step-up in feature/solution development for the internal business clients. This platform-based way of running the business was then progressively rolled out across the group. Prioritization is set by the top team (because empowerment does not mean anarchy), and all IT interventions are run the same way, to ensure consistency and replicability.
SOA vs. EDA: Is Not Life Simply a Series of Events?
For example, in personal banking, the customer-journey platforms cover the customer experiences of searching, opening an account, getting a mortgage, and so on. The business-capability platforms deliver the banking solutions, such as payments and credit analytics, and the support capabilities, such as employee-pension management, visual dashboarding, and management information systems (MIS). Finally, the core IT platforms provide the shared technology on which the journeys and business capabilities run, such as the cloud platform, the data analytics environment, and the set of IT connectivity solutions (Exhibit 2).
Standard Bank contracts with AWS for mass migration to the cloud
The bank has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider with the intention of porting its production workloads, including its customer facing platforms and strategic core banking applications to the cloud.
From what I can tell talking with banks, they’re over that 2010 thing of “public cloud isn’t secure enough.” Now it’s a scramble to move their shit up there.
Dick’s Tech Chief Goes All Out on In-House Software
“Don’t get excited about shipping a feature—get excited about when the feature turns into revenue and turns into profit.”
That's the right focus.
Adobe Summit 2019 analysis – CX hype is countered by Chegg’s digital turnaround story
Chegg isn’t digital-only today. They still ship five million textbooks a year – but their mission has changed. And, as Narayan pointed out, they now need new metrics. Rosensweig said those metrics include subscriber growth, revenue growth, engagement, renewal, and conversion rates. But there’s an underlying metric: create something awesome. ... What we learned was you not only have to get them to subscribe, you [also have to] lower your cost to customer acquisition, which at one point for us was 27 dollars. Now it’s $3.50. Our renewal rates were 63 percent; they’re now in the mid-80s for a monthly renewal.
Naspers plans to spin off its Tencent stake and other holdings
Naspers, which started out as an Afrikaans newspaper group a century ago, has since gone on to invest in a host of startups, mostly in emerging markets. The runaway success of Tencent has created an enviable headache: Naspers has become too big for the Johannesburg stock exchange, where it now makes up a quarter of the local index. Such scale requires foreign investors, not all of whom are keen on South Africa’s currency and political risk. Amsterdam, where Naspers already has staff, has similar listing requirements to Johannesburg.
people tend to assume that confident individuals are competent, when there is no actual relationship between the two qualities. Those confident people are then promoted. Overconfidence afflicts both sexes, but men more so; one study found that they overestimated their abilities by 30% and women by 15% on average.
Hotels robots bad, coffee robots bad
But when the robots were put in place, things went wrong. The concierge struggled to answer guests’ questions. The dancers in the lobby broke down. The luggage-carriers could not climb stairs or go outside. A question-and-answer robot could not handle anything beyond basic inquiries—and responded to at least one guest’s snoring by waking him repeatedly to tell him it could not understand what he was saying. Rather than saving labour, the robots actually required the hotel to increase staffing in order to assist and repair the struggling robots. So the hotel recently decided to lay off more than half of its 243 robots.
Hotel robots bad. But, from the same “newspaper,” as they say, turns out robots are good for coffee and burger production:
Gavin pathross likes his Americano at a particular strength, with exactly 2.8 shots of espresso, an order that human baristas struggle to get right. But the baristas at Ratio, his new coffee shop in Shanghai, are anything but human. Customers specify, order and pay for their coffee via their smartphones. A robot arm then grinds the beans, pumps shots of espresso and carries out the rest of the work. The robot can supply water and coffee in any ratio desired—hence the shop’s name. Once it has prepared the beverage, it passes the finished product to a human waiter for serving.
For one, there’s tons of competition on transatlantic routes. Not only from ultra low cost carriers, but the reality is that nowadays even legacy airlines have incredibly low transatlantic fares, because they know they have to compete. $400-500 roundtrip fares on major carriers are the norm in the off season.
When fares are that low, it really makes you wonder what the point is of flying an airline like WOW Air. Even if they charged $200 roundtrip (which is way lower than their usual fares), you’d end up paying more by the time you paid for baggage, food, drinks, seat assignments, etc.
How are other airlines able to charge these fares? Because the major airlines aren’t making money off economy transatlantic fares in the off season. Think of those cheap fares as paying a bit of gas money, but the reality is that airlines make their money off the handful of people on each flight who are spending $10,000 for a full fare business class ticket. That’s where the money is, and the rest is only working towards breaking even. Ultra low cost carriers don’t have those lucrative passengers.