CI/CD For the Enterprise

As organizations adopt continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) into their software practives, it often stops at building artifacts and running test suites. In the typical enterprise, there are many mory processes surrounding a software release such as change management and product management sign-off. Integrating these buisness processes into CI/CD pipelines allows software teams to spend more time delivering value to customers and less time filling out paperwork.

In this session, you will follow a software development team in Red Hat IT as they journeyed to fully integrate business processes into their CI/CD pipeline.

You will learn how to:
* Integrate code quality checks into your pipeline
* Automate project management processes
* Adapt change management processes to more frequent software releases
* Use a single pipeline to follow code from initial commit to production

Transcript

1. CI/CD FOR THE ENTERPRISE:
   TEACHING AN OLD DOG NEW TRICKS
   Open Infrastructure Summit 2019
   Patrick Easters
   Sr. Software Applications Engineer
   May 1, 2019
   

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2. 2
   THE PIPE DREAM
   CODE
   QUALITY
   SECURITY
   SCANNING
   CHANGE
   MGMT
   PORTFOLIO
   MGMT
   BUILD TEST
   AUTOMATICALLY
   DEPLOY TO
   PRODUCTION
   CONTINUOUS
   INTEGRATION
   CONTINUOUS
   DELIVERY
   

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3. 3
   THE SQUAD
   WHO WE ARE
   ● 22 people (managers, developers,
   SREs, quality engineers, BAs)
   ● Distributed across 3 states in the
   US and 3 continents
   WHAT WE DO
   ● Build and maintain applications to
   help Red Hat customers manage
   their subscriptions and access
   content
   

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4. 4
   WHERE WE BEGIN
   ● Early stages of adopting DevOps practices, but still very siloed
   ● IT Operations group performs majority of releases
   ● Good use of Configuration Management, though it was complex
   ● Averaged 2 releases/mo for our flagship application
   

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5. 5
   THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD,
   VERY BAD RELEASE PROCESS
   QA
   Ops
   Dev
   BA
   Manager
   Change
   Manager
   Dev
   QA
   Stage
   Prod
   Product
   Owner
   PHASE
   

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6. 6
   THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD,
   VERY BAD RELEASE PROCESS
   

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7. 7
   OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
   ● Releases were a significant source of toil
   ● Infrequent releases led to long cycle times
   ● Confusing process
   

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8. 8
   PAAS TO THE RESCUE?
   ● Red Hat IT launched new PaaS offering based on OpenShift 3
   ● Application teams given access to their apps in production
   ● Automated build and release jobs “for free”
   

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10. 10
    CI/CD
    

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11. 11
    SCALING OUT
    ● So far we’ve only migrated a few low-touch apps
    ● Migrated our flagship app: access.redhat.com/management
    ● Started a greenfield app: api.access.redhat.com/management
    

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12. SOLVING CONSTRAINTS
    

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13. 13
    DEV-ON-DEMAND
    ● A single dev environment was no longer sufficient
    ● Moved to short-lived instances following Merge Requests
    ● Shifted left: code quality scans, unit tests
    ● Quick feedback for QEs and BAs
    

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14. 14
    OPERATION “GO GREEN”
    ● Many automated tests flickered and became unstable over time
    ● Manual triage required by Quality Engineers
    ● Conscious choice to allocate time for fixing tests instead of
    developing new ones
    

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15. 15
    MODERNIZING CHANGE MANAGEMENT
    ● Better risk categorization
    ● Removed arbitrary lead time requirement and change freezes
    ● Used “Standard Change” type that is pre-approved
    ● Used ServiceNow API to open/close changes
    

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16. 16
    USER STORIES, NOT FAKE NEWS
    ● Up-to-date Kanban board is important
    ○ WIP Limits
    ○ Current Status
    ● Integrated pipeline with Rally APIs to move stories and create
    milestones
    

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17. 17
    IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CI/CD
    

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18. MEASURING UP
    

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19. 19
    DELIVERY PERFORMANCE
    ELITE HIGH MEDIUM LOW
    Deployment
    Frequency
    on-demand hourly-daily weekly-monthly weekly-monthly
    Change Lead
    Time
    <1h 1d - 1w 1w - 1m 1m - 6m
    MTTR <1h <1d <1d 1w - 1m
    Change Failure
    Rate
    0-15% 0-15% 0-15% 46-60%
    From DORA’s 2018 State of DevOps report
    

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20. 20
    RHSM WEB CHANGE RATE
    Change Requests per Month
    

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21. 21
    LEAD TIME
    

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22. 22
    THE HUMAN FACTOR
    “Our release process used to feel more like filing taxes, but now it’s
    more like sending money with Venmo”
    

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23. 23
    THE HUMAN FACTOR
    “My favorite part of our CI/CD adoption has been the freedom to
    experiment: having disposable merge instances for giving early
    feedback, feature flags that let us try things with a targeted audience
    and fine-tune before turning on new functionality for the entire
    customer base, and even the experimentation that comes with every
    member of the team feeling empowered to try automating some piece
    of our process.”
    

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24. 24
    THE HE-MAN FACTOR
    “I am basically He-Man. By the power of CI/CD, I
    have the power*!”
    *To push changes to production myself when an appropriate
    threshold of quality and organizational preparedness, much of
    which is built into our pipelines, is met.
    

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25. Q+A
    

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26. THANK YOU
    Email: peasters@redhat.com
    Twitter: @patrickeasters
    

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