"These are the voyages of the startup enterprise ... "

The SQUID has resurfaced with two great talks for our November session. (Previously known as our October session. :-)

Talk A: A Start-up in the Enterprise: One Year Down the Line

In a bid to stay competitive, many enterprises attempt to overcome their barriers to change by creating innovation labs. As a “startup within an enterprise,” an innovation lab brings the flexibility and freedom to develop new solutions at a new pace.

In September 2016 John Lewis setup such a lab. "Metro", the new engineering team, was located in a Tech Hub in Birmingham. Physically separated from the majority of John Lewis IT staff but close to a new innovative flagship JL department store and also close to the retailer's National Distribution Centre, the team were asked to provide innovative technologies and solutions, working in an agile way with the rest of the enterprise.

In this session, the Birmingham Tech Hub Lead Engineer, Jujhar Singh, performs a personal retrospective on the first twelve months. What has the experience been of this startup in the enterprise? What were the challenges and are the successes? What impact have they had on the ways of working of those outside the Metro team?

Jujhar Singh

Before becoming the Metro Lead Engineer, Jujhar's 19 year career in IT has included roles as a Security and DevOps consultant, and a Lead Architect. He teaches and is an evangelist for Cloud, DevSecOps, Containers, Serverless, Microservices, and many other cool things.

Talk B: Enterprise-scale CI / CD: Building the Right Pipeline, Building the Pipeline Right

You are working in an Enterprise. You have a large complicated technical landscape and you have many teams working in this landscape.

Being able to deploy in an automated and repeatable way presents you with significant challenges. But these challenges have similarities to the other software engineering problems you solve for your business. You need to understand the requirements for the path to production in order to build the right pipeline. You also need ways to check the implementation to gain confidence that you have built the pipeline right.

In this showcase Aliaksandr Ikhelis (System Team Lead, John Lewis IT) and Timothy Clarke (DevOps Specialist, John Lewis IT) explain how they have applied software engineering principles to the development of their deployment pipeline. The talk will explain the evolution of their pipeline from separately owned development and operations Jenkins instances to the solution they have today with full visibility of a joined up solution in code. Along the way they will talk about the processes they have put in place and the tools that helped them.

Aliaksandr Ikhelis

Alex works in John Lewis Online, Buying and Brand. He provides infrastructure enabling technologies which automate the path to production for various technologies including Oracle ATG, Mobile Web, iOS and Android. He previously was a Senior Software Engineer in Test for Expedia and a Head of Test for blinkbox.

Timothy Clarke

Before working as a a DevOps practitioner for John Lewis IT, Tim previously had various roles as Linux Systems Admin and Linux System Engineer. Most recently he worked for DevOpsGuys helping organisations transform their ways of delivering.