This talk will revisit Columbia’s DevOps journey within a Microsoft Enterprise with specific emphasis on 4 themes:
1) Etsy Day 1 Deploy
2) ChatOps
3) Learning Labs
4) Building a High Performance Learning Organization

ChatOps is being used at Columbia as a transformative technique to gain more participation, enthusiasm, and buy-in.

Similar to learnchef.io, this talk will explore the use of “learning labs” to develop intuition, confidence, and skills for both new hires and internal teams newish to DevOps at Columbia. One example of a lab is to increase resources on existing Servers, create new servers, and tear down servers using Infrastructure as Code and CI pipelines.

We are using regularly scheduled weekly learning reviews to review outages, near misses, and successes from the prior week while also rotating facilitators to develop new capabilities within engineers.

Although DevOps is becoming increasingly mainstream in enterprises, examples of DevOps applied to traditional 3-tier Windows Architecture on premises scenarios are not as prevalent (Although Linux examples are numerous). Microsoft implementations typically focus on e-commerce scenarios and/or simple IIS demonstrations. The cultural challenges at Microsoft enterprises are unique and can be more difficult to overcome as the engineers/administrators are much more accustomed to the GUI and “right clicking”.