July 2017 - Continuous Delivery and Platforms / PaaS

Continuous Delivery and Platforms / PaaS - with Ben Dodd, Jamie Buchanan, Daniel Jones

Talk 1: Ben Dodd - Continuously Delivering Continuous Delivery

The rise and acceptance of Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a key tool in accelerating the journey to continuous delivery of your apps into production with the regularity your business requires. However, all too often the deployment and maintenance of the platforms themselves are dogged with the practices and delays that the CD of apps are all too familiar.

This session will serve as both an introduction and overview of the power of PaaS platforms, in this case Pivotal Cloud Foundry, with a selection of both application and platform case studies, continuously deployed all the way to production, in business critical and highly regulated environments.

Whether you're dealing with apps or globally distributed platforms, we hope to demonstrate that small batch sizes and continuous deployment are not only achievable but essential; no more 2am releases, no more working the weekends during "maintenance windows"

Speaker Bio: Ben has spent the last 6 years continuously deploying swarms of Microservcies to Platform as a Service environments. It’s been a journey fraught with challenges, mistakes and dead ends. Experience with organisations of all sizes has given him valuable insight into the value of true DevOps and Continuous Deployment in delivering and demonstrating confidence in hugely complex platforms, distributed globally and trusted with an organization's Crown Jewels. He is a regular speaker on topics such as Concourse CI, Cloud Foundry, continuous delivery and cloud native transformation within the enterprise

@bendodd (https://twitter.com/bendodd)

Talk 2: Jamie Buchanan - Getting to the Platform at Trainline

Trainline is the leading seller of rail tickets in the UK, with 45m visits a month and 125k journeys planned per day, we aim to help customers plan and save money on train tickets. Over the past few years the technology point of view has evolved from classical infrastructure to a suite of cloud based services. We have recognised a need to present these services as a platform, and to complement that with analogies in team structure. Our operations department has been renamed Platform Delivery. And teams within are starting to structure around this point of view. This talk explores our journey, why we made these changes.

Speaker Bio: Jamie Buchanan is a Platform Reliability Engineer at Trainline.

@jascbu (https://twitter.com/jascbu)

Talk 3: Daniel Jones - Why Continuous Delivery with a Platform is Better for Your Brain

Daniel Jones highlights some findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience that go some way to explaining why continuous delivery ends up not only being more productive, but more enjoyable for its practitioners.

The three key take-aways are:

• Platforms raise the level of abstraction, reducing the size of the problem space. Without a platform it's much harder to have product teams and remove all those crappy silos. We also look at the psychological benefits of product teams.

• The automation and self-service platforms offer means you have negligible transaction costs, which enables you to exploit the present bias rather than have it trip you up at the end of a Gantt chart. Without self-service, you can't do this.

• The accessibility of platform functionality enables continuous delivery.

Speaker Bio: Daniel Jones is CTO of UK Cloud Foundry consultancy EngineerBetter, who have been improving value-delivery at the world’s largest banks, global wealth management firms, FTSE 100 retailers, governments and non-profit organizations. Daniel has delivered keynotes and talks at three Cloud Foundry Summits, internal bank tech conferences, user groups, as well as numerous video games industry conferences. He once even stormed the stage at a music festival to interrupt the performing act and accuse them of accepting bribes!

@DanielJonesEB (https://twitter.com/DanielJonesEB)