Stop thinking about your infrastructure, start focusing on your code

Abstract:

As developers we love to ship changes. Improving existing features and building new features that will make our current users happier or bring in new customers is our core to what we do. While shipping constantly we need to make sure we don't interrupt our service. Software quality, code reviews and proper testing are cornerstones of shipping constantly.

Today shipping less is just not an option any more. We need everyone in our team to focus on how we can improve the product. Every task or workflow that isn’t clearly a step forward needs to be religiously automated and improved.

By focusing only on the changes we introduce into our code and leaving everything from deployment to scaling, error detection and even automated correction to automation, we can focus all of our energy on taking that step forward.

We need to rethink the way we’ve built infrastructure and the workflows we’ve used. Turning servers into one-off Masterpieces isn't the way to go any longer. Instead we need to think of our servers as post-its. Useful, simple to understand and manufacture and we replace them without thinking twice.

Practices like testing, virtualised environments and Immutable infrastructure are the key to this new workflow and will be discussed in detail.

Speaker:

Flo is the CTO and co-founder at Codeship, a continuous deployment service. At Codeship he led the implementation of a fully immutable infrastructure that gets replaced several times a day. He focuses on working with customers and leading companies in the field to bring continuous deployment, immutable infrastructure and building systems in the virtualised world to every software team.