The General Manager of DevOps at TUI UK&I, Clinton Elston, revealed how he does enterprise DevOps in his speech at The National DevOps Conference on the 24-25 May 2017.

Elston broke down ‘his way’ of doing DevOps at the conference. He began talking about how “DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices and tools that increases an organisation’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace enables organisations to better service their customers and complete more effectively in the market.”

His speech consisted of a number of different related topics:

• Long release process and time market
• Questionable deployment confidence
• Late night bug fixing
• How TUI started building their software
• World class fire fighters
• How TUI now build their software
• Fast quality

In order to deliver fast quality, Elston believes that recovering time, releasing small changes often and de-coupling complex services are extremely important. In a bid to distribute continuous delivery, he uses rapid, high quality software faster and more often, empowers reliable teams to ensure quality compliancy and value of software systems and uses repeatable deployments as routine by automations that bring codes to production.

“DevOps is a cultural change, leveraging technology to support how IT chooses to focus effort to deliver quality faster. We need continuous delivery for our customers such as incredibly rapid, repeatable and reliable functionality,” said Clinton.

Like the best of us, he has a range of future goals:

• Better IT alignment and business responsiveness
• Faster, smaller, more frequent releases improved
• Time to market
• Quality of code, products and services
• Productivity
• Customer satisfaction
• Employee satisfaction
• Less waste and fewer defects
• Lower long-term costs

To master these, he needs to make sure that development delivers more, operations protect more and the environments required sustain the progress.

Taking people, teams and silos into DevOps transition is another of his journeys to success. He told attendees what the burdens of ‘day jobs’ are during transformation, as existing staff frequently asked to:

• Maintain current infrastructure
• Learn new skills
• Build out new infrastructure
• Migrate applications to the new environment
• Decommission the old environment

…Noting that no matter what, all managers should listen to their employees.

Being a DevOps fanatic, he told attendees how to crack DevOps cultural change. “Without a plan, there can be no victory. You must have a strategy, not a wish list; map out and define the strategy; understand and categorise your applications and it’s about evolution, not revolution,” he advised.

He finished his speech concluding: “Behaviour isn’t isolated to Dev and Ops, it happens across the company and is usually promoted as part of the company core values. Behaviour is a result of the whole; everyone contributes to making it work and ensuring that it continues to work. Behaviour happens because the people involved see that working together is how we achieve greatness and no single team can do it alone.”

Click here to attend our DevOps Focus Group on 17 October 2017 (soon to be updated).

Written by Leah Alger