DevOps Days Auckland 2017 – Wednesday Session 1

Michael Coté – Not actually a DevOps Talk

Digital Transformation

  • Goal: deliver value, weekly reliably, with small patches
  • Management must be the first to fail and transform
  • Standardize on a platform: special snow flakes are slow, expensive and error prone (see his slide, good list of stuff that should be standardize)
  • Ramping up: “Pilot low-risk apps, and ramp-up”
  • Pair programming/working
    • Half the advantage is people speed less time on reddit “research”
  • Don’t go to meetings
  • Automate compliance, have what you do automatic get logged and create compliance docs rather than building manually.
  • Crafting Your Cloud-Native Strategy

Sajeewa Dayaratne – DevOps in an Embedded World

  • Challenges on Embedded
    • Hardware – resource constrinaed
    • Debugging – OS bugs, Hardware Bugs, UFO Bugs – Oscilloscopes and JTAG connectors are your friend.
    • Environment – Thermal, Moisture, Power consumption
    • Deploy to product – Multi-month cycle, hard of impossible to send updates to ships at sea.
  • Principles of Devops , equally apply to embedded
    • High Frequency
    • Reduce overheads
    • Improve defect resolution
    • Automate
    • Reduce response times
  • Navico
    • Small Sonar, Navigation for medium boats, Displays for sail (eg Americas cup). Navigation displays for large ships
    • Dev around world, factory in Mexico
  • Codebase
    • 5 million lines of code
    • 61 Hardware Products supported – Increasing steadily, very long lifetimes for hardware
    • Complex network of products – lots of products on boat all connected, different versions of software and hardware on the same boat
  • Architecture
    • Old codebase
    • Backward compatible with old hardware
    • Needs to support new hardware
    • Desire new features on all products
  • What does this mean
    • Defects were found too late
    • Very high cost of bugs found late
    • Software stabilization taking longer
    • Manual test couldn’t keep up
    • Cost increasing , including opportunity cost
  • Does CI/CD provide answer?
    • But will it work here?
    • Case Study from HP. Large-Scale Agile Development by Gary Gruver
  • Our Plan
    • Improve tolls and archetecture
    • Build Speeds
    • Automated testing
    • Code quality control
  • Previous VCS
    • Proprietary tool with limit support and upgrades
    • Limited integration
    • Lack of CI support
    • No code review capacity
  • Move to git
    • Code reviews
    • Integrated CI
    • Supported by tools
  • Archetecture
    • Had a configurable codebase already
    • Fairly common hardware platform (only 9 variations)
    • Had runtime feature flags
    • But
      • Cyclic dependancies – 1.5 years to clean these up
      • Singletons – cut down
      • Promote unit testability – worked on
      • Many branches – long lived – mega merges
  • Went to a single Branch model, feature flags, smaller batch sizes, testing focused on single branch
  • Improve build speed
    • Start 8 hours to build Linux platform, 2 hours for each app, 14+ hours to build and package a release
    • Options
      • Increase speed
      • Parallel Builds
    • What did
      • ccache.clcache
      • IncrediBuild
      • distcc
    • 4-5hs down to 1h
  • Test automation
    • Existing was mock-ups of the hardware to not typical
    • Started with micro-test
      • Unit testing (simulator)
      • Unit testing (real hardware)
    • Build Tools
      • Software tools (n2k simulator, remote control)
      • Hardware tools ( Mimic real-world data, re purpose existing stuff)
    • UI Test Automation
      • Build or Buy
      • Functional testing vs API testing
      • HW Test tools
      • Took 6 hours to do full test on hardware.
  • PipeLine
    • Commit -> pull request
    • Automated Build / Unit Tests
    • Daily QA Build
  • Next?
    • Configuration as code
    • Code Quality tools
    • Simulate more hardware
    • Increase analytics and reporting
    • Fully simulated test env for dev (so the devs don’t need the hardware)
    • Scale – From internal infrastructure to the cloud
    • Grow the team
  • Lessons Learnt
    • Culture!
    • Collect Data
    • Get Executive Buy in
    • Change your tolls and processes if needed
    • Test automation is the key
      • Invest in HW
      • Silulate
      • Virtualise
    • Focus on good software design for Everything
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