DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – Europe

Automate the change management process by using development activities and data driven automated assessment of risk of making a change to production, such that changes were automatically approved, resulting in both better delivery outcomes and reduced risk of change implementation.

Chanade and Richard will take the audience on a journey of the last 9 months and how far we’ve coming in standing up a new team at Virgin Media O2, and a new platform, Google Cloud. We’ve gone from zero to many services now operational. Our team is building data products for the entire company, solving business and customer problems. We’re making better decisions, driven by data.

You can reach Andy at: andrew.nicklin977@mod.gov.uk

The history of computer science has seen the development of higher and higher layers of abstraction. Software has evolved from machine code, to assembly language, to C, to Java, to Kotlin. Hardware has evolved from custom-built computers, to commodity servers, to virtual machines, to cloud servers, to containers. Every new layer of abstraction hides enough complexity that we feel, for a time, that building and managing these systems has become trivial.

Low code SaaS platforms are one of the next big layers of abstraction. Systems like Salesforce were born in the cloud, built for non-coders, and manage infrastructure for you behind the scenes. Millions of people are now building their innovation on these platforms using little or no code. The mantras of the SaaS world are power and ease.

But there's a problem with easy.

Easy means fast. And fast means more. And more means complex.

Salesforce, for example, has hundreds of thousands of corporate customers. The largest among them are managing millions of customizations in the form of source code and configuration. While some low-code SaaS systems have in-built methods for managing configuration, traditional "DevOps" tools and practices are generally designed for managing custom applications and aren't designed for SaaS systems.
The fast-growing world of low-code platforms desperately needs ways to manage the emerging complexity. What does it look like to apply DevOps practices and principles to this very different technology? What are the challenges and mitigations, and what does this move to low-code platforms tell us about the future of enterprise software development?

PACE is an approach to creating better experiences for ASB’s customers and people. It's a way of working that puts the customer at the heart of what we do while also making it easier for us to get the job done.

Creating confidence in the technology team is critical at every company. The flywheel effect occurs when we balance business strategy (via Wardley mapping) with technology strategy (via Modern cloud). As a preview of the upcoming IT Revolution book, Dave creates a Wardley Map to show how to use the value flywheel to build confidence, improve your cloud stance and create space for innovation. Many business leaders ask for Innovation and speed, but it’s really Problem Prevention (Well-Architected), Modern Cloud and good Developer Experience that unlock higher value capability.

A new experience story about a Programme set out to enable and transform IT Operations for DevOps.

DevOps has largely been driven by ‘Dev’ and there has been a general feeling in Operations that DevOps has been ‘done to us’. This is an opportunity to share that Operations are here at the DevOps table and we’d like to demonstrate how this different approach to transformation can work. We’ve got the same ambition. and we’d like to encourage others to closely collaborate with their Operations counterparts to achieve true DevOps harmony.

Financial Services has taken 20 years to recognise that it is a software business. It does not have another 20 years to recognise that it is enabled by data. Unlike software natives or data natives, traditional businesses are learning and retrofitting practices in tandem with their service or product offering. The rise of the Chief Data (and Analytics) Officer in mid-2010, was due to the need to safeguard data and evidence control over its usage. This was rapidly followed by traditional businesses wanting to extract value from data to stay competitive and relevant. As we have become data and digital citizens, getting data right is a social responsibility. For professionals in this field, getting decisions based on data right is a moral obligation. 
Since Dodd-Frank and S-OX regulations in the early 2000s, developers have been kept very separate from live operations. The disciplines of DevOps made it easier to protect production environments through engineering rigour and advanced practices and tools. The emergence of analytics professionals in mid 2010 has been mistakenly bundled with software development. For data scientists, data engineers and data management professionals, real data is their raw material and their product. They happen to exhibit coding skills to build those data products. New interactions with IT teams are emerging (with new team topologies) and with those, new practices, tools and technologies that enable DataOps.

This session is about accelerating understanding and proficiency in the field of data and analytics. In highly regulated geographies and industries, every single outcome of a decision (increasingly automated) must be within the boundaries of the law and - in retrospect - meeting consumers' needs. For that to happen, we must bridge the chasm between software engineers and analytics professionals.

What is DataOps? It is the practice of orchestrating human and automated activities as the data flows through a software-enabled production line, in order to guarantee the integrity of data and decisions based on data. The stations in this production line may be discrete applications or a complex system of people and software. Conceptually, these flows are data pipelines in a data factory. DataOps wraps new disciplines around DevOps, such as the interactions with customers (iterative model design) to operations (statistical process control for drift/bias detection).

Schlumberger is a leading global digital solutions provider, deploying groundbreaking technologies to enable performance and sustainability that are crucial for the global energy industry and their customers. Schlumberger started on its cloud journey in 2016, resulting in the industry-leading DELFI* cognitive E&P environment, where we moved the oil and gas E&P (exploration and production) lifecycle into the cloud. The E&P industry is highly regulated, so to manage the risks associated with handling customer data, the preference was for on-premises systems. To update these systems, typically an annual release cycle was used, with one major release, followed by a series of smaller updates. It is vitally important that studies of assets are comparable over time, so that different E&P strategies can be compared. The annual release cycle supported this well, as it provided long-term consistency. The software product development governance strategy used a fixed set of phases with stage gates between each and an agile iterative development approach within each stage. For each release, a formal ceremony with senior management was held, to review the release-ready criteria and the stage’s results prior to approving the release. This strategy worked very well.

With the move to the cloud, there is the need for continuous delivery and continuous compliance. With deployments happening on-demand, the existing governance strategy did not fit with the cloud-based ways of working. We will describe how we developed and rolled out a new software development governance strategy called season-based governance (SBG) for use by all our cloud-hosted products. SBG is a governance process that supports high alignment and high autonomy and has the notion of a set period (season), which is independent of the product release cycle to deliver value to our end users as frequently as we wish.

This is enabling us to build, deliver, and operate on-demand the cloud-hosted DELFI E&P workflows securely in all geographies.

We will cover the guiding principles, how this supports the DevOps ways of working, and how we incorporate end-user feedback at all stages of the development cycle. We are driving our software delivery and operational performance capability improvements by focusing on the DORA metrics. We will also describe the tooling ecosystem to support this, how we are upskilling the organisation and discuss the challenges of changing the organizational mindset.

Have you have ever dreaded an upcoming audit? Do you see the auditors as the “bad guy” or an adversary? Do you wish you got more value out of an audit? If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, then this session is for you. Join leaders from Nationwide Insurance as they show you how they took a page out of your book (or rather a few pages from the following IT Revolution books: The DevOps Handbook, The Phoenix Project, Sooner, Safer, Happier) and applied Agile, Scrum, and DevOps concepts to the internal audit process. Attendees will explore Nationwide’s journey to auditing with agility and learn how they can strengthen the relationship with their auditors, work together with them for a common, value-focused goal, and have fun doing so!

In the new remote-first and hybrid workplace, many organizations are struggling to catch up with new tooling and ways of working. Many are discovering for the first time that the physical office was covering up poorly defined teams and poorly defined areas of focus, threatening their DevOps transformation efforts and the overall health and success of their business.

In this talk, learn how the Team API can be an effective tool to improve the experience of teams that need to interact in a remote setting. What information do they need? Where can they reach us? How can we help them? And how can we evolve the Team API to reduce misunderstandings and turn confrontational situations into productive, valuable insights? The authors of the acclaimed book Team Topologies - Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais - explain and then simulate the use of the Team API pattern using a role play scenario between two teams. They show how an evolving Team API can help to turn confrontations into positive interactions, clarifying expectations and helping teams to work effectively in a remote-first or hybrid context.

In their new book, Remote Team Interactions Workbook, published by IT Revolution, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, coauthors of the highly popular Team Topologies, provide proven patterns for a successful remote-first approach to teams. Using simple tools for dependency tracking and patterns from Team Topologies, such as the Team API, organizations will find that well-defined team interactions are key to effective IT delivery in the remote-first world.

It's easy to get discouraged reading books about industry best practices that say things like "always test in prod!" and "10 deploys a day!!" At times, they can make the goal of being a high-functioning DevOps organization feel out-of-reach for large enterprises, where changes to the way we operate take time to roll out. A few years ago, Vanguard started its journey to adopting Site Reliability Engineering across the IT organization, and that transformation effort is still underway today.

In this talk, we will share where we started, how far we've come since then, and all of the steps we've taken along the way, as we've worked to evangelize changes to the way we measure availability, enable experimentation, leverage highly-available architecture patterns, and learn from failure.

In March 2020, the UK’s tax department HMRC was faced with a complex problem: how to improve the accuracy, reliability, and truth of information about customer activities, in order to counter fraud AND adapt to the speeds that the situation required, ensuring that every claim was reviewed in 72 hrs.?

As the UK government announced statutory sick pay, a job retention scheme, and self-employment income support, the Customer Insights team at HMRC began to transform the Customer Insights Platform (CIP).

CIP is an internal platform built on top of AWS, which provides highly available transaction monitoring and auditing to internal customers across HMRC. This session tells the story of how the Customer Insights team transformed CIP from data storage to data product capabilities and built an intelligent risking service to bake automated risking decisions into customer activities.

Millions of claims were submitted by taxpayers, and every single one was automatically assessed for fraud detection, supporting the work that HMRC fraud investigators were doing in very difficult circumstances. This was a revolution in the speed of data analysis within HMRC. Meanwhile, the thinking of the Customer Insights team was transformed, from data storage to data as a product at scale.

This session will include details of CIP architecture, the delivery mindset of the customer insights team, and working practices that delivered such successful outcomes that the Customer Insights team received a personal note of gratitude from the Prime Minister, and CIP became a multi-award winning platform at the 2021 UK IT awards.

Bill Bensing will talk about the upcoming book, Investments Unlimited, A Novel about DevOps, Security, Audit Compliance and Thriving in the Digital Age.

Disney is one of the world’s largest media companies and home to some of the most respected and beloved brands around the globe. Embracing the latest technology is an important strategic focus at Disney, allowing guests to better connect with Disney and allowing Disney to better connect with guests in innovative and delightful ways.

We will tell you a story about a century-old organization that has scaled its SRE practice to ignite digital magic across the globe. This team of SRE Jedi Knights is on a mission to foster curiosity, communities of practice, and technology awesomeness while venturing where no SRE has gone before.

In this talk, we will deliver epic stories of successes, setbacks, and failures while pushing large-scale platforms to their limit and delivering the best in-seat, digital experiences, products, and content to our guests and subscribers across the globe. Showcasing some of the technology and automation we have built.