March 2020 Meetup

PLEASE REGISTER HERE IN ORDER TO GAIN BUILDING ACCESS ON THE EVENING: http://bit.ly/LCDMarch17

Join us for an evening of great discussions & talks and beer & pizza.

We'll start off with the food and the drinks at 6.30pm.

Talk 1: Applying CI/CD outside it’s natural habitat - Delivering IP networking software to Router manufacturers by David Parker

The use of CI/CD is well established for delivering SaaS applications but what if that’s not your context? Testing and release cycles in industries such as telecoms equipment and many others can still be measured in months or even years for many organisations.

In this talk, I’ll describe how our team at Metaswitch Networks applied CI/CD techniques to transform the delivery of IP network protocol software to our customers, who use it to build the routers that power the internet. That has helped us to move from big annual releases to having software that is always shippable to any customer, and the team are happier and more efficient too!

I’ll cover…

• How we got management buy-in and funding by using story-telling, surveys and by some quick and dirty prototyping.
• Why setting up a dedicated team succeeded when reserving time within existing development teams had failed.
• How we built a network level automation framework using Docker, Ansible and other open source tools.
• Why a test scheduling and reporting system transformed the way people tested and became a victim of its own success.
• How we scaled using cloud bursting to cater for peak load.
• Why Continuous Delivery of the docs proved one of the hardest nuts to crack!

David Parker is an Engineering Manager in the Networking Software Team at Metaswitch Networks. He has particular responsibilities for Engineering Productivity, Automation, Testing and Delivery.

David has worked in various Development and Management roles across Metaswitch for the last 18 years. He has a passion for helping engineers to properly understand all aspects of software quality, and for using automation and CI/CD to deliver quickly and reliably.

Talk 2: 4 Questions to Ask Your Dev Team by Hannah Foxwell

Good collaboration between Platform Teams and Application Teams is critical for delivering any production service. Practices such as site reliability engineering and continuous delivery must be understood by everyone to be effective, but creating that shared understanding can be hard in an existing organization. In this talk, Hannah will provide a simple guide to getting started.

Our experience has shown us that Platform Teams and Application Teams don’t talk enough, and we don’t talk about the right things. This session will give you four simple questions to start that dialogue—you might be surprised what you learn if you ask the right questions!

Hannah Foxwell is Associate Director at Pivotal Labs (now part of VMware). Hannah is a champion of the HumanOps movement and organises DevOpsDays London.

Meetup Retro - Please visit the following retro board:
http://bit.ly/LondonCD