fabric8's social side

tl;dr lets deliver value faster and more reliably by improving communication and automation

With the new wave of exciting technologies around containers, my thoughts and efforts have focused to what this means to us and to the way we work, how it can be even more enjoyable to do our jobs with greater satisfaction and establish those all important feedback loops so that we can learn and improve?

We know introducing new platforms or technologies into a small startup or an enterprise organisation isn’t as simple as running the installation script and reaping all the benefits that have been promised. We also need to be aware of what the impact is to processes, the organisation and be aware of any political issues. Having the products and technology to carry out CD for example is not enough, it’s how can we adopt a CD way of working? How can we have confidence that features are tested effectively and approval steps aren’t going to cause bottlenecks and delays? What are the effects on a Release Management team? How can we ensure all the right people involved in taking an idea from inception all the way through to a supportable feature running in a live environment are aware of that change and provide consistency in the way they work, communicate and operate. Knowing where and how to get the information required to do their job without causing delays to others. We now know that the traditional layers of teams such as developers, testers, architects, operations, application support and management are not the most effective way to get features live. Opening tickets between teams that can be conveniently lost or parked because of social conflicts has disastrous effects. Our cross functional teams are now made up of the people responsible for taking that idea and getting it into production. They might not be co-located, they could well be distributed around the world and suffer from communication troubles.. of course they may well be sitting in the same office and suffer from the same communication problems!

In the fabric8 project we have been working hard at identifying and integrating powerful, elegant OSS projects on top of OpenShift and Kubernetes. The aim is to provide an experience that helps support and grow a positive culture and improve productivity through social tools such as the fantastic Lets Chat, intelligent extendable automation with Hubot allowing us to interact with fabric8, improved code quality with Gerrit plus SonarQube and project management with the beautiful Taiga.

With the need to support an ever increasing number of new services we have integrated the above projects with the fabric8 ‘one click’ (currently only Maven archetypes but great with Camel) project creator using JBoss Forge, automated repo setup on Gogs, fully automated CI and CD setup leveraging the Jenkins DSL plugin, automated extendable integration testing with Arquillian, build and deployment notifications (approvals coming) with Chat which also provides traceability and search features via the platforms centralised logging tools Kibana and Elastic Search.

Now all of these projects running on the platform will be creating juicy stats that we can pump into InfluxDB. When combining these with Grafana it provides powerful visualisations, analytics and agile metrics which aids continuous improvement. For example we will be able to correlate the number of commits, reviews, failed / successful builds and deployments, approvals, wait times and even communication across our cross functional teams. All of this is vital information that can be used to understand what affects the Time To Market of a feature, identify pain points (and the good points) so that we can learn from them. As a developer I can see how my features are performing and where they are in the release process. As a CIO I now have visibility of how the organisation is communicating and working together. As a manager I can see who my high performing teams are and areas that can benefit from agile coaching as an example. All using Open Source Software…AWESOME ☺

Stay tuned for screencasts and if you’re in London on the 11th June then register for a free event and come to see more on this as well as loads of other exciting talks! https://medium.com/fabric8-io/microservices-architecture-developer-day-on-june-11th-in-london-b7809200f51e