Infrastructure WebConf Europe Vol.5

Closer collaboration between developers and operations people brought businesses many benefits. It is also fair to say, though, that it created new headaches. Some practices, especially continuous deployments, forced us to rethink the traditional security sandwich, with conceptual work up-front and a pen test at the end. It was easy to sneak a “Sec” into DevOps, it was reasonably obvious to call for security to be “shifted left”, but in practice this raised even more questions. Based on his experience working as a consultant Erik will address these questions. He will discuss practices like container security scanning, binary attestation, and chaos engineering, alongside examples of concrete tooling to support these practices. In addition Erik will show how the concept of fitness functions, which have become popular in evolutionary approaches architecture, can be applied in the security domain.

Observability is hard, observability in a globally distributed ephemeral environment (cloud) is very hard. In this talk we’ll go through how to build an observability strategy to ensure that you’re capturing all the right telemetry on your cloud based systems and how to get your people on board with it.

Building a Platform is not an easy task. When companies decide to go for it a lot of expectations arise. Teams expect reduced costs, increase in productivity and a system that helps them deliver value to the company while minimizing the overall cognitive load. However, it’s more often than not that platforms built or bought fail to deliver on these expectations, becoming instead a big cost project that needs to be rebuilt or worse, thrown away. In this talk, we will give an overview of anti-patterns one should avoid when building Platform products and some insights that can help you to build the right one for you.

Thoughtworks recently worked with an insurance platform provider to move their next big platform to the cloud. The client had over 40 years presence in the market but largely relied on their cash cow product and needed to modernise their offerings to keep up with the increasingly digital market. Seema Satish & Cat Morris worked with their existing release management team to migrate their on-prem tech assets to Azure. In this talk we will highlight our difficulties with tech, product and people and what victories we had in managing them. We’ll share how our experience wasn’t as simple as a “Wingardium Leviosa” spell from Harry Potter!