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Arrested DevOps
Arrested DevOps

DevOps in the Windy City with Jeff Smith, Jerry Cattell, and Sameer Doshi

24 oktober 2016
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Om avsnittet

Matty, a Chicago native who has worked in the city's IT world for about 20 years, gathers three local DevOps people to ask what makes technology and DevOps in Chicago different. The idea came from something J. Paul Reed said on the show after DevOpsDays Chicago in 2014, that the companies there were doing real things and not "Uber for kittens." Jeff Smith manages site reliability engineering at Grubhub, where Jeff has also been the DevOps cheerleader for about two and a half to three years. Jerry Cattell is VP of engineering at a small, fully remote medical startup, and an organizer of the Chicago DevOps meetup and DevOpsDays Chicago. Sameer Doshi is a DevOps architect at kCura, a legal e-discovery company moving from an on-premise product to a hybrid and SaaS offering. The recording happens during Game 5 of the Cubs and Dodgers series, and Matty gives score updates throughout.

A Small World

All four have crossed paths before. Matty traces how Classified Ventures, the company behind cars.com and apartments.com, is connected to Grubhub through people who left HomeFinder. Jeff recalls meeting Grubhub's CEO at a Twitter meetup around 2007 and turning down the startup for a safe job at Accenture. Jeff adds that Chicago feels like a really tight community where you keep running into the same people, so it doesn't pay to burn a bridge on the way out.

Sameer moved from Boston and New York, including a stint at Citi, and found a work culture that felt like a family. On starting at kCura, Sameer looked through the Outlook directory and recognized Matty and Trevor from the podcast. Jerry grew up in Miami, worked for FedEx swapping out computers for Y2K in tropical places, and spent four or five years in the Bay Area, through the crash. When Jerry's wife got an opportunity in Chicago around 2003, all that could be found online was banks, until Orbitz stood out. Jerry notes the meetup gets hosts, sponsors and speakers whenever it wants. Jeff says that in upstate New York there was information hoarding, and in Chicago people were humble, cognizant of imposter syndrome and willing to mentor.

Midwest Pragmatism

Matty says the Midwest adopts things after they hit the West Coast and then the East Coast banks, and that Chicago has very traditional IT and a lot of startups with little in between. Jeff says it comes from Midwest practicality: the region isn't interested in the brand-new shiny, it's about "solving actual problems. And generating revenue." Businesses here have straightforward models, like delivering food and taking a slice, and Jeff tells the team to ask, "How does this help us deliver food better?" Jerry counters that innovation still comes out of Chicago: Graphite was developed at Orbitz, and Gogo had just presented Foremast at the meetup, a tool to automate Spinnaker pipelines. Matty calls it pragmatic innovation, like Etsy's, solving a real itch. Sameer adds that this leads to an iterative approach, where you can share work in progress and get "this is great progress" and not "you've got a long way to go." Jerry says the solutions from Netflix and Google look cool but aren't the scale of problem Jerry deals with.

Jeff reminds the audience that big, slow institutions are still bringing in revenue, and that people from them at DevOpsDays feel left behind. Jeff's message is that you may not be able to move as fast as others, but that doesn't mean you have to sit still.

How the Conversation Has Changed

Matty says that two years ago at DevOpsDays Chicago the story from traditional companies was "this will never work here," and now it's "this is really hard and we're not moving as fast as I wish we were," which is a sign you can do something about it. Jerry says the meetup, held downtown at 5:30, still misses suburban companies, though they post videos.

Jeff says DevOps doesn't have to be a top-down transformation: pair with the developer you work with most for half an hour a day, or have lunch with the team for the service you support. It spreads, and exposure between teams reveals "learned helplessness" on both sides, like developers who don't have access to log aggregation or ops people who restart the same service every night. Jeff tells of visiting the NOC, hearing a PagerDuty alert for a Splunk log velocity threshold, and turning it off on the spot, and getting donuts. Sameer says it's also middle-out, with a central team establishing practices and engineers deciding on their own to speed up deployments, and describes an ideal of engineers deploying to production with supporting people embedded on the team.

Matty says wherever you work, part of your organization is already doing this. Matty adds that a mandate from a Fortune 10 CIO won't magically create DevOps, and that managing sysadmins means being the person who says "I know you can think of 100 reasons why this won't work. For a minute, let's just pretend it will." Sameer spent five years implementing config management at Citi, sometimes tracking changes quietly when told to just get it done. Matty tells the story of learning Chef out of spite when told it would take a year and tens of thousands of dollars in training, and says that's not recommended.

Chicago Companies Doing Interesting Things

Jerry names Gogo, Hyatt, which is moving website work to Docker, Braintree, DRW, which is doing a lot of bare metal DevOps, and ThoughtWorks. Jeff likes the way Hyatt is building a startup-like DevOps culture inside a big company, and Jerry says US Foods, around for 100 years, began with a single new application. Matty warns you have to avoid "bimodal" as an end state, and points to Target's dojo, which starts small but is for everyone. Jeff treats bimodal as a transitional state, and says that a pilot makes other managers say they want that. Matty says pilot it, stack the deck, and beware that people want the magic button, which was the point missed in the 10 deploys a day talk. Matty adds McDonald's, Walgreens, Hyatt and the Mercantile Exchange, which need velocity with safety. Sameer adds that Morningstar rotates developers through ops teams, and Jerry adds 1871, the incubator. Jeff says the startup challenges Jeff took part in felt very Midwest: less about technology, more about the minimum viable thing.

Matty ends by noting that Chicago's DevOps meetup has the best URL, meetup.com/devops, which to Matty means Chicago invented DevOps.

  • ADO episode at devopsdays Chicago 2014 with J. Paul Reed
  • Jerry started his career swapping out computers for Y2K in tropical locations. Nice job to have!
  • Most sportsball talk on any episode of ADO to date!
  • “You may not be able to move as fast as others, but that doesn’t mean you have to sit still” - Jeff
  • Conversations Matt has had with local folks in the past two years have changed from “this will never work at my company” to “ this is really hard, and we aren’t moving as fast as I would like us to be”
  • 1871 - Chicago incubator
  • Chicago DevOps Meetup
  • 2016 Chicago Tech Madness Bracket

Companies doing cool devops in chicago

Community & Event Stuff

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Check Outs

Jeff

Jerry

Sameer

Matt

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