DOES15 - Vineet Banga and Jacob Johnson - Learnings from a DevOps Organization in the Making

Vineet Banga, Senior Software Manager, GE Digital

Jacob Johnson, Director of Cloud Services & Operations, GE Digital

GE Software is building a platform for Industrial Internet. Over the last few months we have transformed our services into a cloud only offering. To achieve these results we have had to ramp our devops practices at an unprecedented rate, and we continue to do that as we move forward. Since we are building a platform to build application which monitor industrial assets such as: Wind Turbines, Jet Engines etc, security and compliance are extremely critical. While, these requirements require us to have clear delineation between operations and development, we continue to push the boundaries and blur the lines between dev and ops. This talk cover the organization model, development and operations practices that we have adopted:

Top Challenges & insights:
-Access control to production instances & policies on how to manage them
-How to prevent developer’s throwing code over the wall?
-How to take realtime feedback from deployed services to improve the development practices?

Learnings:
-True collaboration is driven by having a critical mass across the teams, who share some core beliefs.
-Talk of pager duty is generally not a motivator for developers, sometimes it can turn them off from thinking about operations
-Giving developers more control in the outcome of the service they have built is a much better way driving true collaboration