Presented in Agile Singapore 2013 Conference
Agility in software development is oftened defined by the shortening of feedback loops; by providing feedback to users, stakeholders and developers faster, we can act and change more quickly. Many teams are now successful in providing feedback throughout their development cycle with showcases, collaboration and prototyping. However, the "last mile" of getting a feature into production and ensuring it operates effectively once there is still a challenge for many teams.
This presentation focuses on how a combination of cloud computing (broadly defined as public clouds such as Amazon Web Services and private clouds such as OpenStack), infrastructure tools (such as Puppet and Chef) and a collaborative culture (known as DevOps) can help in getting software out faster and keep it running there with fewer outages. The presentation looks at a common deployment pipeline and how the technologies listed above can be utilised to make the pipeline more efficient, robust and effective.
By using cloud computing and DevOps, teams can get products to market faster and shorten their feedback cycles allowing them to compete more effectively in their chosen market.
For further reading, please go to http://www.andykelk.net/agile/the-last-mile-devops-to-make-you-agile