Pipelining Platforms, just like Apps

Oct 18, 2016| Dan Young

Imagine you’re responsible for operating shared IT services in a global enterprise, providing a self-service platform to your internal developers. If you were to continuously deliver this platform, in exactly the same way as cloud native apps themselves, what would it mean to your teams and your business?

Firstly, try to imagine a shared IT platform in a global company where its suddenly economical to work in small batch sizes, allowing you to actually embrace change rather than resist it.

Imagine being able to programmatically express, safely deploy and test every single change you want to make in production, at the same rate you make the decisions, delivering immediate business value and getting rapid feedback.

Imagine being able to assert what a working platform looks like, from a user perspective, and have continuous acceptance testing that proves you’re delivering on your promises, as you continue to evolve your platform.

Imagine absolutely everything that defines your platform in source control, allowing reproducibility, clear communication and easy scaling of the team.

Imagine nobody ever manually touching running systems to make ‘snowflake’ changes, ever again.

Imagine no maintenance windows. Just sustainable engineering and continuous delivery of value.

Imagine coming into work at 9am to find that a critical update released by your vendor has been automatically detected, deployed and tested in development and production environments with zero downtime while everyone in your platform team was asleep.

Imagine being able to create any number of identical development pipelines & platforms on demand, so that pairs of engineers can work on stories to improve the pipeline, in parallel, without being stuck waiting on each other’s builds.

Imagine continuous testing of your DR plan, where an entire instance of your platform is deployed, backed up, destroyed and recreated in a different part of the world, as often as you want.

EngineerBetter has recently been working with our partners to help deliver these kinds of revolutionary benefits in a global bank, using Cloud Foundry, BOSH and Concourse CI. You can watch a talk giving more detail about our experience or read about the technology and engineering that makes it possible.

If you’re interested in finding out more, please get in touch. We’d be happy to answer questions and share what we’ve learnt.