Comments on: Hacking Culture for Continuous Delivery

By: developers

developers — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 10:39:27 +0000

Infrastructure as Code. This is the most important entry point, providing full-stack automation. Commodity hardware can be used with this approach, as reliability is provided in the software stack. Datacenters must have APIs; you can’t rely on humans to take action. All services including things like DNS have to follow this model. Infrastructure becomes a product, and the app dev team is the customer. Stackify enables agile developers to provide agile support by giving developers production access to their applications, servers, and databases to improve their ability to do application support and troubleshooting.

By: bawigga

bawigga — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 19:39:41 +0000

“Common Attributes of Web Scale Cultures … You must also design for failure, and this is where a lot of teams struggle.”

What does it mean to design for failure? Just touching on the face that you should write pretty defensive code?

By: Gil Hoffer

Gil Hoffer — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 09:51:12 +0000

Great post! I relate deeply to all the points mentioned in it.
While I agree probably the greatest challenge is a cultural one – taking an org with distinct dev, ops, and test groups with existing practices, prejudices and tradition, and make everyone switch their line of thought to continuous delivery is not a simple battle.

Unfortunately though, even if everyone in the organization is aligned towards continuous delivery – it is still pretty hard to achieve (as not every aspect of the infrastructure is controlled by an API, and it requires a massive effort from the organization). We need to be able to * completely* abstract the application from the underlying infrastructure – similarly to what hypervisors do between physical servers and operating systems.

I work for Ravello Systems, where we try to achieve just that – supplying a new universal platform which abstracts (existing and new) applications from the underlying cloud (all aspects – compute, network and storage). You can check us out at http://bitly.com/Te5KRZ