Look Who it Was Random video

Taming the Kraken - How Operations enables developer productivity by Nathen Harvey

1,552 views · Published 3 May 2012 · 26:57 · Indexed 6 October 2026

Channel: Confreaks · 2012 · Science & Technology

Watch on YouTube

Are you having trouble launching new features because of friction between development and operations? At CustomInk, we've reduced this friction by making changes to our teams, processes, and tools. Come find out what we've been up to and learn how you can implement similar changes in your own environment.

There's always a bit of tension when getting features from idea to production. In this talk, we'll look at some of the changes CustomInk has made to reduce this friction and keep the new features coming. Gone are the days of bi-monthly deploys, office pools dedicated to guessing when this deploy will be rolled back, and the ceremony surrounding the deploy-rollback-fix-deploy cycle. Today, ideas flow from product managers to developers to production with ease thanks to a number of changes that we've made to our teams, processes and tools.

During this talk, we'll look at:

How product managers drive the release cycle

Ideas and customer feedback
Prioritizing development requests
Managing branch merges and deployments (yes, product managers can help here!)
How operations enables developer productivity

Spinning up development environments - Vagrant, Chef
Infrastructure Automation - Chef
Enabling Continuous Deployment - Capistrano and caphub
Failing gracefully - Fault-tolerant load balancing with ldirectord
How developers get their code running in production

Staging environments
Continuous Integration - Jenkins, Green Screen
Staying on topic: Deploying changes when they're ready
Getting rid of the over-the-wall mentality - Dev & Ops working together

Enabling developers to do it themselves
Pair programing infrastructure automation
Keeping the process light and the communication flowing

More from this channel