Lessons from a DevOps Journey

In large financial institutions, treasury departments-specialized teams of traders and experts in liquidity, risk, accounting, financial forecasting, and quantitative analysis-manage the organization’s wealth and financial risk. These departments require large, complex, third-party software products that must change often to support the treasury’s complicated business processes. Matt Callanan describes how a team of developers and operations staff-the DevOps team-applied agile principles to the “last mile” and reduced software deployment from one week to one day. He discusses how their DevOps team collaborated to develop automation solutions to support ongoing deployment activities and solve many issues in the operational environment. Matt explores their lessons learned: how to get the DevOps team’s skills mix right; tips on collaborating in a large organization; how to tighten feedback loops, and the pros and cons of various tools-IDEs, scripting languages, and deployment systems. Along the way Matt shows off some real-world code examples for development and operations practitioners.