Improving Delivery at the Financial Times

This deck presented at Agile London in November 2016, covers a few examples of how the FT have been improving their capability to deliver systems and includes:

- The FT Engineering checklist
- Internal services for developers
- Keeping infrastructure costs under control

Transcript

1. Improving Delivery at the Financial Times Rob Godfrey Technical Architect, FT Technology @robgodfr
2. FT Technology Group • About 350 people • About 25 development teams • About 9 programmes of work @robgodfr
3. Environments Programme @robgodfr • Physical & cloud infrastructure • Web infrastructure • Application security tools • Build & release tools
4. @robgodfr 0 1 2 3 4 Elapsed Time (months)
5. The convergence of DevOps* @robgodfr • The Lean movement • Agile methodologies • Infrastructure as code • Continuous Delivery *term coined by John Willis, co-author of the DevOps Handbook
6. 1. FT Engineering Checklist 2. Internal services for developers 3. Keeping infrastructure costs under control
7. Building, deploying and supporting a system is a complex undertaking @robgodfr
8. @robgodfr
9. 2. Internal Services for Developers
10. @robgodfr
12. Services need to be valuable to developers @robgodfr
13. Services need to be marketed and easily discoverable @robgodfr
14. Services need to be self service and complete quickly @robgodfr
15. Services need to be automation friendly @robgodfr
16. Services need to be available on demand @robgodfr
17. But most of our services didn’t start out this way @robgodfr
18. How have we improved our services for developers? @robgodfr
19. Value stream mapping @robgodfr
20. 1. Visualise the current process @robgodfr
21. 1. Visualise the current process 2. Identify areas to improve @robgodfr
22. Where is time being spent unnecessarily? @robgodfr
23. Handoffs between teams are typically expensive @robgodfr
24. 1. Visualise the current process 2. Identify areas to improve 3. Design future state @robgodfr
25. Automate standardised work @robgodfr
26. Minimise team handoffs @robgodfr
27. 1. Visualise the current process 2. Identify areas to improve 3. Design future state 4. Iterate towards future state @robgodfr
28. 3. Keeping operational costs under control
29. Simplicity and self service drive higher usage @robgodfr
30. Higher usage of infrastructure often means higher cost @robgodfr
31. Make infrastructure costs visible to teams @robgodfr
32. FT Platform 2 - Selecting an EC2 Instance Type
34. Make recommendations on how to be more cost efficient @robgodfr
36. FT-Webapp - Migration of EC2 Server Instances to Amazon Linux
37. 1. FT Engineering Checklist 2. Internal services for developers 3. Keeping infrastructure costs under control
38. Thank you. @robgodfr