Title: A devops journey

Abstract:

In this talk we will follow a Norwegian insurance company over 6 years where they went from a very traditional to a completely automated on-premise infrastructure and continuous deployment model. As part of their transformation of Operations, Development, Deployment and Processes they identified and agreed on 9 DevOps principals. Some of these principals is still considered very controversial outside this company, even by todays DevOps standards. One of these principals is for instance "no branching"! These new practices and level of automation allowed them to eliminate any previous release barriers, in terms of both time and risk, and to dedicate focus to their customers and business to develop, improve and experiment with their software on a complete different level than before.

Parallel to this journey and in the same company, a new open source automation and infrastructure management tool specifically created for Windows emerged. Its name was ConDep and automate everything Windows for this and many other companies today.

By sharing what this company did and their experienced outcome, we hope this will give valuable input to others in a similar process or motivate to fight for the DevOps way if you're not. Not to mention shed light on some of the more controversial decisions, which we believe might benefit a lot more than you might first think.