Embrace Variables So Your Customers Don't Have To

Release Engineering can be a science. Like any science, there is a goal of controlling for variables to understand how change impacts the results of the overall system (in this case the software delivery pipeline). At Puppet Labs, our goal is to control for variances on operating systems, package managers, service managers, et al, so that our customers don’t have to. But to achieve this, we must purposely add variables into our release train. We currently build and test for more than 60 operating system targets, and that number is only increasing. When you ship an abstraction layer, you have have to test and build for all of the underlying components, and at our scale that must be automatic and developer serviceable.

Transcript

1. Embrace Variables So Your Customers Don't Have To Let’s do some science Michael Stahnke
 Director of Engineering Services | Puppet Labs Twitter | @stahnma
3. https://www.flickr.com/photos/openscience/10813661054
5. –Johnny Appleseed “Type a quote here.”
6. Hypothesis: This build artifact is shippable
7. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pillarofautumn/13770741955
8. Experiment: Build and QA the artifact
9. https://www.flickr.com/photos/mightyohm/2729474646
10. Set up the experiment
11. https://www.flickr.com/photos/naturewise/1174298274
13. https://www.flickr.com/photos/sanjoselibrary/5373376882
14. https://www.flickr.com/photos/danielproulx/3524826318 Goals for our system feedback time self-service agile deterministic
15. Developer must be able to make a small change and measure it without intervention
16. Control Variables vs independent variables
18. Sometimes two/three pipelines
19. https://www.flickr.com/photos/simon_morris/9735841203
20. https://www.flickr.com/photos/danielproulx/3524826318
21. Diff between SaaS and on Prem • Cost of being wrong • Cost to fix • Ability for user to upgrade/know about upgrades • support multiple streams
22. Variables
23. We have lots variables
25. What packages make up our commercial product?
26. Several hundred github repos (450ish)
33. 61 Agent Platforms
34. 33 Master Platform Targets
46. "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except of course for the problem of too many indirections.” — David Wheeler
47. You solve abstractions with abstractions
48. Zoom out
51. Control Variables vs independent variables
52. Study through observation and experiment
53. Observation
59. Volume
65. Health
74. Variables you didn’t realize you had Lost links in gist Lost files
75. Failures Submodules Binaries in git unit tests exiting 0 on failure AIX everything artifact duplication data duplication external services
76. Difficulties Visualizing the pipeline Change tracking SREs for Pipelines Capacity Planning
77. Summary You can do science
79. Tools • Clockin - Internal at PL, should be Open one day soon • Vmpooler - https://github.com/puppetlabs/vmpooler • vmpooler-cli - https://github.com/stahnma/vmpool-cli • Packaging repo -https://github.com/puppetlabs/packaging