Software Delivery in Small Batches

Adam welcomes Viktor Farcic to the show. Viktor Farcic is a Principal DevOps Architect at CodeFresh, a member of the Google Developer Experts, Continuous Delivery Foundation Ambassadors, and Docker Captains groups, and a published author.

Adam & Viktor discuss the how and why of GitOps and how ArgoCD fits in the deployment pipeline. Many fun sidebars in this conversation into the role of docs vs code and why you should never compromise on your workflow when quality is at stake. This is a fun and easy conversation. Best served with a beer instead of the usual coffee. Enjoy the laughs.

Viktor Farcic's Links

• Website
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• The DevOps Toolkit Book Series
• The DevOps Toolkit Video Series
• DevOps Paradox Podcast
• ArgoCD

Adam Hawkins' Links

• My appearance on The DevOps Paradox: A Day in the Life of a SRE
• Next Gen Deployments @ Skillshare (Webinar)

Adam welcomes Torin Sandall to the show. Torin is the Vice President of Open Source at Styra and the co-creator of Open Policy agent.

Adam & Torin discuss the origin of the project, why create new language from scratch called Rego, why that language is awesome, how Adam fell in love with Conftest, and how to use all these tools to create more secure systems.

The first five or so minutes are for Small Batches housekeeping and a special announcement!

Adam Hawkins' Links

• Conftest (You really should try this!)
• My Kubernetes Manifest Rego Policies

Torin Sandall's Links

• Open Policy Agent

Adam welcomes Derek Comartin to the show. Derek is a Microsoft Most-Valuable-Professional and distributed systems architect. He also co-hosts the Loosely Coupled podcast.

Derek discusses the ideas behind his talk the "Loosely Coupled Monolith" and "Context is King: Finding Service Boundaries". Great high level conversation on how software design principles inside applications scale out to distributed systems as a whole. 

Adam Hawkins' Links

• Website
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Context is King talk
• Context is King blog post
• The Loosely Coupled Monolith

Derek Comartin's Links

• Website
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• My Youtube Channel
• The Loosely Coupled Show

Adam welcomes Dr. Mik Kersten to the show. Dr. Mik Kersten is the author of the best selling book "Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework". This is a follow up to the earlier "Four Types of Work" episode.

Adam & Mik cover the Flow Framework's origin story, the relation between The Flow Framework and DevOps, the importance of structure & dynamics, and why organizing for fast flow is the prime directive.

Adam Hawkins' Links

• Small Batches #9: The Four Types of Work
• The Flow Framework

Mik Kersten's Links

• Mik Plus One Podcast
• Project to Product Book
• How Value Stream Networks Will Transform IT & Business (Presented at DOES18)

Adam welcomes Joe Kutner to the show. Joe is a Software Architect at Salesforce Heroku. He's been writing and speaking about the 12 factor app for years and continually evaluating the practices at Salesforce Heroku.

Adam & Joe discuss the misconceptions of the 12 factor app and the gaps between the 12 factor app and continuous delivery requirements. This is really a follow up discussion to the earlier episodes on the 12.1 Factor app.

Joe Kutner's Links

• Cloud Native Build Packs

Adam Hawkins' Links

• Small Batches #5: The 12 Factor App
• The 12.1 Factor App: Config
• The 12.1 Factor App: Logs
• The 12.1 Factor App: Dev-Prod Parity

• Jason's testing course
• Jason's website
• Jason on twitter
• Jason's podcast: Rails with Jason
• My review of Accelerate
• The DORA Report

Today I’m covering the 2019 book "Team Topologies: Organizing Business & Technology Teams for Fast Flow" written by Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais.

Let me read off their official bio:

So I’m stoked to finally discuss Team Topologies on Small Batches. This book has come up so many times in my work as an SRE at Skillshare and tangentially related to everything I’ve discussed on Small Batches to date. This is because team architecture and software architecture are directly related to software delivery performance.

That’s particularly why I enjoyed Team Topologies so much because it’s truly a book about high velocity software delivery. In fact it’s right there smack in the title. Plus it provides a language to discuss this facet of software delivery.

You’ve likely encountered some of these concepts before, so this time around it may just be a new language.

I’ll share a personal anecdote from earlier in my career to set the stage for this episode. 

Roughly fives years ago I lead the platform team through a complete ground up rewrite at a previous company. We were divided into technology teams: The web, mobile, and platform team. Given these boundaries each of respective team lead set out to create their internal architecture. Nothing to see here: just Conway’s law in action. It worked well here because we had isomorphic technology and team architecture. 

Then something happened out of the blue shortly after the rewrite completed. 

The organization went through a total re-org that changed the team structure, their responsibilities and how they interacted without doing anything to address the underlying technical architecture. This created confusing boundaries, ownership responsibilities, and left so called "independent feature teams" at the mercy of the small number of capable backend engineers capable of working across the various internal services. 

These problems could have been avoided with some foresight and planning. Plus it’s especially bothersome because the entire engineering team had just finished a ground up rewrite that architected a system to support an entirely different team topology! If there was ever a time for a reverse Conway maneuver that was not it.

This example speaks to the importance of Conway’s law and how team and software architecture fit together to create fast flow or on the other hand just inhibit it.

Team Topologies provides a framework that avoids this problem from the outset by optimizing for fast flow.

Links

• Small Batches #34: Team Topologies with Matthew Skelton
• @Manuelpaisable
• @MatthewPSkelton
• Buy Team Topologies
• Monoliths vs Microservices is Missing the Point—Start with Team Cognitive Load @ DOES Europe 2019
• Team Topologies Posters
• Team Topologies on Mik Plus One
• Team Topologies at Parts Unlimited w/Manuel Pais
• The Idealcast # 5: The Pursuit of Perfection: Dominant Architectures, Structure, and Dynamics: A Conversation With Dr. Steve Spear

This is a special episode of Small Batches. I interview Dave Farley in this episode.

Dave, along with Jez Humble, is the co-author of "Continuous Delivery" published in 2010. The book introduced the ideas that grew into DevOps. So, no surprise that DevOps and continuous delivery are the same most people. 

Together Dave and Jez introduced continuous delivery to the world. The practices and ideas still hold true ten years on.

Time and research have demonstrated that continuous delivery is the most effective way to develop software. If you’ve read Accelerate then you know what I’m talking about. That’s partially why am so passionate about it and that doesn’t even account for the fun I have working in that environment.

Dave and I talked about different aspects of continuous delivery beginning with the difference between software development and software engineering. Or as Dave put’s it: scientific rationalism.

We also speak about the connection from delivery, feedback, and experimentation. Or, as he put’s it: "just doing engineering".

He also shared why he doesn’t like the term DevOps. I gotta say I tend agree with him after hearing his reasoning. 

Lastly I get his view on the Preflight Checks I mentioned in an early episode of this podcast. Go to smallbatches.fm/11 for that episode.

Now I give you my conversation with Dave Farley.

You can find Dave at:

• The Continuous Delivery book
• His YouTube channel
• His blog
• His consulting services
• On Twitter

• The Phoenix Project
• The Unicorn Project

If you enjoyed this format then tweet me @adman65 or @smallbatchesfm.