Run Your Damn Application

John Keiser - Monday, February 2 15:40-16:00 - B.4.039

Your important new distributed application is a month from the go-live date. Developers have carefully built it up, piece by piece, with fault tolerance designed in. It has been performance optimized, and unit tested to an unprecedented 85% coverage! Now you get operations and development collaborating to get it deployed, using tools they both understand. Devops, right?

Yet everyone is angry, frustrated and stressed. The product fails to run when you deploy it, due to elementary issues. It's slow. The built-in fault tolerance doesn’t work. Debugging the issues takes weeks. Your one month to go-live turns into six months, and development and operations are ready to kill each other at the end. What went wrong?

It went wrong on day one. For the entire development cycle, every line of code in the application was exercised, but nobody ever ran the application. If this scenario sounds familiar to you, come to this talk and learn why it happened, and how you can address it.

Slides are available on Speaker Deck.

About John Keiser

John Keiser is a veteran codeslayer of the internet age, having developed, tested and led teams at Netscape, Microsoft Bing, and now Chef for the last 20 years. In his current role as Mad Scientist, he focuses on making provisioning and configuration easy enough that even *he* can do it. If his secret lab exploded, he would leave behind a wife, three young kids, a large collection of video games, and a unicycle team.