Makers & Builders

So, we've all heard of the word DevOps, we've all heard of the word FullStack developer or Backend/Frontend and oh - you specialise in Javascript next to all things but love to tinker with Ansible playbooks and Python scripts. But who are you really and why doesn’t it matter?

With the emerging culture of self-organising teams, it is also crucial to have operational ownership,making it possible to address changes that can be done by the same integration or delivery team. We no longer talk about a "strategy team", a "development team" or an "infrastructure team". The customer is the main stakeholder in this vision. However not being able to make changes yourselves to any bolt in the entire pipeline, to fix a particular issue for that client, is very frustrating.

Pillars

The main pillars that we are trying to learn about are rapid delivery, reliability, improved collaboration, feedback loops, and security in a way that enables full ownership from a delivery team. This can be done using custom tools or by using existing products.

What this track is looking for

For DrupalCon Barcelona we are looking for a whole lot of best practices and lessons learned,  that did improve your team to get better at one or more of those pillars. In today's world, a lot of those objectives can be achieved with technology and very good communication.

Rapid delivery can be obtained by making sure you have a very good continuous integration and a continuous delivery process or automation. This could mean that any change to your site is automatically tested and when approved in the process, it can be automatically deployed.

Reliability can equally be achieved by a combination of continuous integration and continuous delivery. Add a whole lot of monitoring to the mix and we are able to measure reliability and improve based on these measurements, Service Level Indicators together with Service Level Objectives.

Performance and optimization is fundamental, but we are targeting sessions that teach a delivery team to take that performance into account already during their deployment. How to detect issues or even suggest fixes automatically?

Next to all this, we can’t forget security and DevSecOps Automation and embedding the facilitation of security is critical for a DevOps team to succeed. With security we mainly mean the assurance you can give your customers to not worry about that aspect, and the ease of which your delivery team can embed thinking and acting on security in their workflow.

Ultimately it is all about the culture of collaboration between different roles in the team so that we can increase the delivery and speed of value to our end customer.

Tell your story

How we develop web applications has changed significantly in the last few years. Composer based workflows, containerized local development, security updates, automated testing, continuous deployment and other practices are no longer “nice-to-haves” but business critical parts of many development or even less technical teams.
Have you created tooling to improve any of the above? Have you created microservices or infrastructure that help deliver value rapidly? Do you have learnings from working in a team that does or does not incorporate the DevOps culture? We want to hear from you at Drupalcon. Tell your story by submitting a session to the DevOps + InfrastructureTrack.

About the track

The DevOps + Infrastructure track is about ensuring reliability in a highly volatile world. Think of getting services up and running in a sustainable controllable way, think of rapid deployment, think of being faster than your competitor without compromising on excellence while being able to take ownership of the entire application lifecycle.
Come learn how to deploy faster, verify quality code more quickly and unlock new efficiencies and value for your business or organization. In the current era we are all competing against each other based on time. Deliver business value more quickly compared to your competitor. This track tries to unlock some of the secrets other organisations already know for a while now.

Blogpost is a rework of work done by Ricardo Amaro, Jason Yee and Nick Veenhof for Drupalcon Dublin 2016 and Drupal Europe 2018