Anders Wallgren on Containerize Your Enthusiasm

• 0:41 Introductions & background
• 1:05 Adoption of containers is increasing – one survey indicated 42% of organizations surveyed are using them for something
• 1:42 The impact on the software build pipeline when adopting containers – make the container the primary build artefact
• 1:57 Advantages of containerization include environment fidelity – removes the “works on my machine” response
• 2:33 Container orchestration platforms are good at managing the challenges around scaling and resilience
• 3:05 In order to take full advantage of these capabilities you have to architect the product to support them
• 4:05 If you’re not using a loosely coupled architecture it becomes very hard to get the benefits of containers
• 4:45 Architecture is a significant challenge for agility and DevOps – the need to move away from monoliths towards microservices requires a fundamental rethink of our products
• 5:48 These are not new lessons – we seem to be doomed to relearn the same lessons over and over again
• 6:22 Most large organisations have “two of everything” – lots of legacy systems which are not architected for the new approaches along with some new platforms and products
• 6:48 There are patterns for eroding the monolith – eg the Strangler Pattern
• 7:02 Software organisations who are still building monolithic applications do so at their own peril
• 7:30 High-performing organisations who have adopted DevOps and adapted their architectures are orders of magnitude faster (time to market) than those who haven’t
• 7:54 Not every organisation needs to be a unicorn, but you need to be able to deliver at the speed at which the business needs, which will definitely be more frequent than every six months
• 8:30 These ideas are not new, and we have known about them for decades – it’s not the quality of the daily work that matters, it’s the improvement in the quality of the daily work
• 9:30 What’s happening in the corporate environment – organisations are slowly rearchitecting their systems, adopting containers and micro-services
• 10:05 These transformations take a long time and require support and patience
• 10:20 One result of the transformation is the reality of “hybrid” architectures which include elements of both monoliths and micro-services
• 11:54 The need for flexibility in deployment and tooling that supports different target platforms
• 12:56 If you run your application in a container it will be more secure than if you run it on the bare OS
• 13:29 Looking out to the horizon – functions as a service, serverless architectures, more decoupling of services, more capabilities in container orchestration platforms
• 14:48 How “function as a service” will impact on application design
• 15:55 None of these advances absolve us from the fundamentals – having good architecture, good quality code, design principles and craftsmanship
• 16:25 The database is a common source of coupling and presents design challenges 
• 17:10 At the very bleeding edge we see lambda implementation and functional programming being implemented
• 18:10 Irrespective of the approach being taken and the tooling used the quality practices still need to be in place
• 18:57 The misuse of data and dashboards – many of the metrics we collect and display are vanity metrics
• 20:15 The need to get feedback data and metrics which are useful in order to improve
• 21:20 Focus on actionable metrics – don’t show me a metric unless there is something I can do about it or it is something I should take action about
• 22:05 Examples of outcome based metrics which could be used
• 23:39 For metrics to be useful you need to devote time to identifying the ones that matter and how they will be collected and presented
• 24:50 What’s happening with the Electric Cloud product

Mentioned:

• Agile 2017
• Electric Cloud
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Mesos
• Martin Fowler – Strangler Pattern
• State of DevOps Report
• Gartner
• Lambda functions