April 2016 Summaries

The author has joined LaunchDarkly, an early-stage startup with a promising product and market opportunity. They have observed positive customer feedback and value provided by the product. The team is described as brilliant, fostering a learning environment and collaboration. The author expresses excitement in contributing to the company's growth and assisting other companies in their continuous delivery efforts.

In this episode of To Be Continuous podcast series, Edith Harbaugh and Paul Biggar discuss the emergence of DevOps 2.0 and its implications on continuous delivery and software development. They talk about how continuous delivery can give early validation powers to teams and denounce the unnecessary risks associated with April Fools jokes not backed by continuous delivery. The podcast highlights the importance of continuous delivery in reducing risks, improving product-market fit, and enabling faster iterations for both startups and mainline companies.

The text discusses an efficient process used by LaunchDarkly to deploy new versions of their services on Amazon EC2 instances, using Ansible for orchestration and maintaining a 'cattle, not pets' mindset. It also highlights the issue of "zombie" instances that can accumulate over time due to errors in the deployment process, which may go unnoticed by monitoring systems as they do not raise any alarms. To address this problem, the author wrote a Python script that detects zombie instances and publishes an alert to an SNS topic. The script assumes the use of tags on EC2 instances and load balancers for discovering live instances. Instructions are provided for setting up the script in one's own environment, including modifying the custom.py file with appropriate settings and running the deploy_lambda_function.sh script to package and deploy the Lambda function. The author also mentions that additional setup is required for adding subscribers to the SNS topic based on individual needs.

The author's company, a San Francisco startup making a continuous delivery platform, was approached by Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services to be a DevOps partner and present at their DevOps Keynote. Despite initial skepticism, the author embraced this opportunity as it allowed them to reach new audiences. Participating in Microsoft Build proved beneficial for the company as they were able to connect with current customers and prospects from various regions, leading to a motivated pipeline of potential clients planning pilots and proofs of concept. The event also provided an opportunity for the team to engage directly with customers and gain valuable feedback on their product. Furthermore, the author was impressed by Microsoft's new approach as a platform for all developers, rather than just .NET users, and its commitment to building a substantial partner ecosystem. Overall, the author would highly recommend participating in Build for its access to global software customers and the amplifying platform of Microsoft for showcasing their product.

In this episode of To Be Continuous, Edith Harbaugh and Paul Biggar discuss the challenges faced by Open Source infrastructure with guests Nadia Eghbal and Sean Burns. They explore how to support Open Source projects financially, the role of sales and marketing in promoting these projects, and the importance of technical documentation. The conversation also touches upon historical examples such as the development of highways and cars in the United States, drawing parallels between physical infrastructure and digital infrastructure.