DevOps and Organisational Transformation From the Trenches
Andrew Hatch, DevOps Manager, Seek
This session will present a detailed case study on the organisational transformation Seek has undergone over the last 4 years within its IT Department. Responding to rapidly changing market conditions, Seek significantly expanded its IT workforce in 2014 to meet new challenges in a marketplace it had traditionally dominated. Through broadening its technology platforms, fundamentally changing the focus and way IT engages the business and delivers product, it is now in a constant cycle of continuous improvement focusing heavily on decentralisation, autonomy and automation. The presentation will focus heavily on our people, processes and the way we used technology to achieve our objectives along with the numerous challenges we faced in this environment of cultural change. This is a presentation delivered from the coalface, it is not a prescriptive manual on how to “do DevOps”, there are more than enough of these in existence now, but instead will take the audience on a journey through this four year timeframe, not shying away from the mistakes we made or sugar-coating the difficult decisions we faced. Starting from a time when our Operations teams were hamstrung by a technical debt legacy, constrained to a single vendor platform, living with constant system failures, reactive decision making and a hero culture that led to countless late nights and production deployments that only numbered 2 per month. We delve into how we set about meeting these challenges and also when we had to change our approaches to continually get better. We will look at how an ambitious project to get rid of testing environments took us into our first foray into AWS and using the hard lessons gained from that experience, how we pushed forward, focused on constantly improving the three key areas of people, process and technology and eventually got to the other side with a now incredibly diverse technology platform that would have seemed like a fantasy when we started. Finally we will explain why we are still not satisfied and how we still need to keep improving. This is not a “tech heavy” case study, nor a lecture on the wonders of DevOps. It's a warts and all story of organisational change, full of hope, suffering and redemption with broad appeal to both technical and non-technical people alike.
DOES17 San Francisco
DevOps Enterprise Summit
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