Agile

Practical Operability for Developers and Testers

Tutorial Outline

In this one day tutorial, we explore practical, tried-and-tested, real world techniques for improving operability with many kinds of software systems, including cloud, Serverless, on-premise, and IoT:

  Logging as a live diagnostics vector with sparse Event IDs
  Operational checklists and ‘Run Book dialogue sheets’ as a discovery mechanism for teams
  Endpoint healthchecks as a way to assess runtime dependencies and complexity
  Correlation IDs beyond simple HTTP calls
  Lightweight ‘User Personas’ as drivers for operational dashboards

These techniques work very differently with different technologies. For instance, an IoT device has limited storage, processing, and I/O, so generation and shipping of logs and metrics looks very different from the cloud or Serverless case. However, the principles – logging as a live diagnostics vector, Event IDs for discovery, etc. – work remarkably well across very different technologies.

Attendees will gain insights into operability and why this is important for modern software systems, along with practical experience of techniques to enhance operability in almost any software system they encounter. Learning objectives are reinforced through worked examples and exercises.

No computers or laptops are necessary for this tutorial.

 

Matthew SkeltonMatthew Skelton has been building, deploying, and operating commercial software systems since 1998. Co-founder and Principal Consultant at Skelton Thatcher Consulting (http://skeltonthatcher.com/), he specialises in helping organisations to adopt and sustain good practices for building and operating software systems: Continuous Delivery, DevOps, aspects of ITIL, and software operability.

 Matthew curates the well-known DevOps team topologies patterns at devopstopologies.com and is co-author of the books Database Lifecycle Management (Redgate, 2015), Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET (O’Reilly, 2016), and Team Guide to Software Operability (Skelton Thatcher Publications, 2016).

 

Rob ThatcherRob Thatcher has substantial experience helping organisations to build effective technical operations, support, and delivery teams, and design and operate effective IT architectures. With Director-levelexperience in the financial services sector, his focus is on building high availability and high performance environments in on-premise deployments, hosted private cloud environments, and public cloud services. Rob is co-author of the book Team Guide to Software Operability.