DevOps at Hiscox Devops Connect March London

www.ranger4.com DevOpstastic

DevOps @ Hiscox

Gareth Wharton

Hiscox CTO

v5


Why DevOps ?

• From our IT Strategy –

– “Be nimble in responding to market

opportunities”

– “Flexible technology at the heart of the

business”


DevOps – classical definition

Development Operations

Culture of shared goals that reduces the friction between Development and Operations


DevOps frictionM

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Do more!Do less!

RFC’sCABDeployment guideRollback guideDaily status callsStaff availabilityIssue trackingEnvironment bookingEscalation processesEmergency processesSmall change processesetc etcMr. Dev Mr. Ops


DevTestBizThingyOps

• Why do we think the issue of working well

together and aligning goals is limited to

Developers and Operations?

• Shouldn’t everyone involved in the change

process work together to accomplish shared

goals?

• DevTestBizThingyOps should be the real name


Hiscox yesterday


BermudaUS Europe London MarketsUK

Hiscox yesterday (ish!)IT

cap

abili

ty

Groupdevelopment

Group supportGroup

infrastructureGroup testing Group DBA

Group release and

deployment

Group architecture


Hiscox tomorrow (ish!)Europe

Dev

Support

Testing

DBA

Release and deployment

Architecture

UK

Dev

Support

Testing

DBA


Architecture

London market

Dev

Support

Testing

DBA


Architecture

USA

Dev

Support

Testing

DBA


Architecture

Bermuda

Dev

Support

Testing

DBA


Architecture


Hiscox Model

• Federated

• Cross skilled teams

• Cradle to grave responsibilities

• Shared goals and incentives

• Underpinned by the Platform Services Group

• What started out as an ambition to increase the

pace of change has evolved into “rebooting” the

IT team


Platform Services• Growth of the business is challenging IT to find new and

better ways to do things

– Means working smarter not harder. Doesn’t mean an ever

increasing head count

• Platform Services helps break down silo’s between teams

by providing a change platform that is re-usable between

multiple teams

• Help others use the platform (they don’t implement

themselves!)


Core platform capabilities• Source code management

• Artefact management

• Automated application

deployment

• Automated server configuration

• Load performance test

• Automated functional test

• Continuous Integration and

automated code build

• Application Performance

Management

• Agile planning

• Defect management

• More...


Be careful...

You don’t solve a silo issue by creating another silo! BAD

Having a team that evangelises DevOps ideas, concepts and tooling is GOOD


Why DevOps – da Vinci big

rules

1. Speed, quality, cost - think like a start-up

2. One team with a common objective – single business & IT

programme

3. Keep it simple - rewarding simplification above perfection


What did we do – Convince the CIO


Created the day 2 team

Day 1 release

Day 2 releases


Day 2 team


Continuous Delivery change approach

Dev

Version

control

(SVN)

1. Check in changes

Build(Maven)

3. Build

Artefact repository

(Artefactory)

4. Store artefacts

Regression test

(Selenium)

8. Test

Performance test

(JMeter)

9. Load testSysTest

UAT

Production

10. Deploy

CI Test servers 7. Deploy

CI

(Jenkins)2. Monitor for changes

Continuously automatedOn demand – click button to deploy

Deployment(uDeploy)

5. Instruct deployment

Server config(Puppet)

https://www.google.com/url?q=http://blog.cloudbees.com/2013/04/meet-butler-at-jenkins-user-conference.html&sa=U&ei=0dYqU9f4J4PNhAenqYDABw&ved=0CC0Q9QEwAA&usg=AFQjCNHq8H1qgg5St0jpvjgvMxF7HNUi_A

https://www.google.com/url?q=http://blog.cloudbees.com/2013/04/meet-butler-at-jenkins-user-conference.html&sa=U&ei=0dYqU9f4J4PNhAenqYDABw&ved=0CC0Q9QEwAA&usg=AFQjCNHq8H1qgg5St0jpvjgvMxF7HNUi_A

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAQQjRw&url=http://www.trademarkia.com/udeploy-85524730.html&ei=eeG_U9eOGsauO5_GgfgD&bvm=bv.70810081,d.ZWU&psig=AFQjCNERBEoLxO6pujCrCRmuy_5tEek_rQ&ust=1405170425470398

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAQQjRw&url=http://www.trademarkia.com/udeploy-85524730.html&ei=eeG_U9eOGsauO5_GgfgD&bvm=bv.70810081,d.ZWU&psig=AFQjCNERBEoLxO6pujCrCRmuy_5tEek_rQ&ust=1405170425470398


793 releases July to October 2014

529

108

60 5838

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

CI SYSTEST UAT STAGING PRODUCTION

Releases per Environment


Automation Benefits

Staff needed Time taken / release

Cost / release

Manual Release 8 3 hours £1,650

Automated Release

2 20 minutes £45

Reduction 89% 97%

19

In the go-live week we did 47 releases, not only did we save £75k on release costs, but there’s no way we could physically done that many releases without significantly increasing team size.


It’s not just about the automation

• Don’t think DevOps is just about the automation

• There’s a massive cultural shift

• If every change is automated, you know exactly what was

changed, by whom and when.

• We’ve taken away RDP access (there was lots of noise)

• Audit is simpler

• Training the team is much easier

• Therefore its much easier to skill up


Was it worth it ?

21

Project Sponsor

MyBoss


Was it worth it?

ProgramManager

MyBoss


Extreme sports deployments....


How are IBM/Ranger4 helping?

• Selected IBM UrbanCode Deploy as our application deployment

engine

• Help deliver the 1st phase of the biggest change program Hiscox has

ever undertaken

– Risky? Couldn’t deliver it any other way!

• 50 releases last week in 1 application alone

• 17.5 man days of effort reduced to about 10 minutes

• Help enable reducing a 10 week change cycle down to 2 weeks

• We went from 1 person knowing how to do to do a release to thousands (kind

of!)

• Investigating proof of concept with IBM Rational Test Virtualisation

Server


Convincing your boss


Convincing your boss

• Avoid lots of $$$ ROI calculations -

management take these with a pinch of

salt

• Instead focus on time to market, avoided

effort etc

• How are you going to do it otherwise?


DevOps on a slide…

People Process Technology

Develop, configure, test & support Deploy

2 weeks

Review

Businessconcepts for

change

Continuous analysis and prioritisation

Create teams of “purple people”. They are not “blue” of the business or “red” of the technology, but a blend of the two, hence purple. This is the PITstop concept, this required a significant cultural shift both within IT and with our business teams.

The team, use processes built on the principles of Agile software development

The team use a number of automation tools, to speed up the delivery process, across build, test and deployment


Takeaways

• The real value is in making change across

people, process and technology, if you can’t

change all three, you will significantly limit

your success

• It’s hard

• It’s well worth it (measure everything to

prove your success)

• If you don’t do it, your competitors will

DevOps at Hiscox Devops Connect March London

Technology

Transcript of DevOps at Hiscox Devops Connect March London