In this DevOps Chat we speak with Laurel Dixon-Bull of Urban Code and Frank Canihuante of Travelers about CI/CD. Frank explains to us how he improved the CI pipeline at Travelers and some of the challenges he faced with the scale of a large enterprise like Travelers. Good case study.
As usual, immediately below is the streaming audio of our conversation. Below that is the written record of our chat. Enjoy!
Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. Alan Shimel, Editor in Chief, DevOps.com. Here for another DevOps chat. Today we have two guests on DevOps Chat. First of all we have Laurel Dickson-Bull of IBM’s UrbanCode. Laurel, welcome to DevOps Chat.
Dickson-Bull: Hey, thanks Alan. I’ll just give you a quick introduction. I’m an offering manager for UrbanCode Deploy. And I started at IBM about 14 years ago, working on internationalization and localization. I spent a few years in release management and saw the agony of software delivery. And then now working very close with UrbanCode Deploy delivery team.
Shimel: Excellent. And our second guest is Frank Canihuante. If I mispronounce it I apologize Frank. We’ll give you a chance to correct. And Frank, you’re with Travelers. Welcome to DevOps chat.
Canihuante: Hi, Alan. That was close enough as far as pronunciation. Yes. So I’m a tech lead here at Travelers. I’ve been with the company for three years and was actually hired to lead the technical aspects of setting up a new pipeline actually. Been a developer for over two decades under various roles, different types of projects. And for the past 10 years or so, I’ve been very involved with things that relate to what we now call DevOps. And always thought of that as being just doing good software engineering.
Shimel: Absolutely.
Canihuante: So this is right up my alley.
Shimel: So we spoke a little off camera or off mic before we started today. And Frank, you mentioned that you’ve been doing sort of very DevOps like things for the last 10 years, way before they started calling it DevOps. And you know you’ve been riding this wave for a while. But Frank, I wanted to take a quick moment and talk about sort of the legacy that you had at Travelers. You mentioned you joined three years ago and you were brought in to really kind of update the pipeline, the CI process if you will. Right, continuous integration. Can you give us an idea of what it was like when you first came on board?
Canihuante: Sure. You know the interesting thing about this project that is now basically setting up a pipeline. That it wasn’t really stated as such. It was about replacing the old systems. And that right away told me that we weren’t quite sure of what the actual solution was. Now, these days we think of CI, CD, even three years ago, those two words weren’t all that popular as they are now. Of course now we understand that that is the way to go these days. You set up a continuous integration and a continuous delivery set of tools. So there was a lot of confusion. There was a lot of angst because everyone knew that if you were about to change, these tools are near and dear to your day to day activities as a developer, as a QA, as a DevOps professional. There’s some disruption that’s gonna happen. So lots, lots of expectations and a little bit of apprehension as well.
Shimel: Yep. Got it. And so Frank, you came in and you know tasked with updating this. For someone who’s listening out there and says geez, that’s just where I was. Where Frank was three years ago, that’s where I am today. Can you give ’em a little advice? Where do you start?
Canihuante: Sure. So I have put pipelines together before but at a smaller scale. So my biggest concern _____ at the same time what made it very exciting for me to take on the job was how am I gonna do this in a large enterprise. Travelers has 30,000 employees, 3,000 of which are in IT. So I knew this is directly or indirectly impacting hundreds of thousands of people. So there was a lot of responsibility to go with it. So one thing that I would recommend is you have to do your homework. You have to have a lot of experience in development to be familiar with the way developers think. Because at the end of the day they are your customers. And they’re very demanding. They have things that work now, however quirky they may be, it works. You’re about to change that. You have to be sure whatever you’re gonna replace the old tools with, it’s something that you as a developer feel comfortable with. This is where the Devs part of the DevOps part comes in. And the other part also is once you have the system put together, you have to run it like a product. And this is something that sometimes we in the rush of getting something out there, people don’t perhaps think of the operational aspects of a system. But it is something that we need to have.
Canihuante: I was just saying that you know putting it together requires a set of skills that basically call on all your development experience. But you cannot forget about how are you gonna run these tools, how are you gonna operationalize them. So trying to keep your customers happy is yet another challenge.
Shimel: Yeah. Absolutely. And so Frank, ultimately you and the Travelers team wound up partnering up with IBMs UrbanCode deploy on this project, correct?
Canihuante: Yes. So we looked at several tools. We had all the main vendors of CI and CD tools.
Shimel: I mean you don’t have to name names but —
Canihuante: Okay. Sure. So we had a process in which we brought in several vendors of CI and CD tools. And we really put UrbanCode Deploy through its paces as far as the deployment tool. We had in our RFP, which we did have a formal RFP process, many, many questions that related to how it actually worked and how it was actually operated. So we had a pretty good idea before we even brought the tool in for actual POC. But having the POC is what really made a big difference in realizing what it can do. It was very different from the old tool that we replaced. And actually once we had our users in, it brought the level of angst and anxiety that they had about the new system down to the normal levels. You know one thing is to see a demo, another thing is to actually put your hands on it and actually get an application be deployed through this new tool.
Shimel: Got it. So Laurel, let me turn to you a little bit. When did you become involved with Frank and the Travelers team?
Dickson-Bull: Well, I’ve been aware of Frank and Travelers team probably for the last couple of years. I think I visited you down you in Connecticut Frank, probably a year or two ago. I have to say though most of what I know about Frank and his team are things that I’ve heard. Really strong team. They’ve actually adopted UrbanCode very quickly and have you know made really fast progress. You know to some people, two or three years may seem like a long time. But to standardize on a deployment tool and in a large organization with ten thousand developers, that’s actually really, really good progress.
Shimel: I agree. So Frank, give us an idea you know first of all do you consider this project to be successful at this point?
Canihuante: Absolutely. There are many ways to measure how a project is successful. Projects of this type. In our case, we had over 2,000 applications in the old system. And one way to measure success is to say how many do we still have in the old system after a years’ time. So out of the 2,000 plus, we got about a hundred or so that are still in the old system. And they’re on track to be actually migrated to UCD in the next few weeks or months. But in addition to that, there are these other things that actually make it successful. Just having built something in collaboration with hundreds of other people and get their heads together as to putting together a pipeline that’s gonna make their life easier down the road. That’s another way to measure success. It’s kind of hard to measure it, but you see it in the way people talk. For example, we’re no longer talking about the way we need this tool or that tool. We’re talking about two different ways to solve a particular problem. Before, we didn’t even know how to solve it. Now we have multiple ways. And even the conversations are different. It’s not about particular problems that a group may have. But it’s always thinking how can we solve this problem for everyone. How can we come up with that pattern that solves how to build and deploy applications? Not just for my group or my division, but for the entire company.
Shimel: Got it. And Laurel, does that jive with you know I’m sure you’re speaking with other organizations using UrbanCode Deploy. Is that sort of measure of success the same you know across the board? The same type of thing?
Dickson-Bull: Yeah. Well, I would say that what Frank described as you know the challenge of standardizing on a tool for the enterprise and then going through that and it really opens up the conversations. Because once you have the visibility into the deployment automation and you start having success operationalizing your software delivery. People get excited about that. And they want to you know solve problems of automation. Dev and Ops are talking to each other. And the conversations become more collaborative. So I have definitely seen that with other large companies. And you know Travelers does represent a very large segment of our customers in the financial services. You know banks and insurance make up a good chunk of our customer base.
Shimel: And you know Frank, in talking again off mic a bit you know setting up your CI pipeline. UrbanCode Deploy’s obviously a tool that you use. But you guys are also using the integration with that and Jenkins. Correct?
Canihuante: Right. Yes, that’s correct. And Jenkins is interesting too because it was already in-house so _____ reasons why people wanted it. But it comes in two flavors. We have Jenkins ______ with various versions ______ also standardizing on a enterprise version of it. And we provide solutions that now encompass not just UrbanCode Deploy but also Jenkins. And we’re also providing a standard way of solving particular types of deployments. For example, how to deploy to WAS or JBoss. How to do .Net deployments. How to do database deployments. And it gets everyone really excited about having a standard way but sometimes even with flexibility to even tweak that a bit. Because we have some groups that only do say .Net, others do only JAVA or some do a mix of both. And now we have a menu of solutions that will span more than one tool. In addition that, there are other things that we have done that we are picking up these oddball applications. Like for example, telephone applications, voice applications. Even things that _____ not thought that we were actually going to install for but we have the ability to do that such as mainframe components, desktop components. We’re all bringing it together as a family of solutions on these tools in addition to integrations with other systems outside of the tools themselves. Such as the ticketing system for example or the monitoring system.
Shimel: Got it. And Laurel, you know I’ve known about UrbanCode having integration with Jenkins for some time. Actually at Interconnect I think it was last year or the year before, Eric Minick of UrbanCode actually did a joint session with Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the founder of Jenkins and CTO of CloudBees. And so I’m wondering have you run into a lot of UrbanCode customers who are also using Jenkins?
Dickson-Bull: Oh, yeah. For sure. I would say about half of our customers are using Jenkins. And UrbanCode is you know a great extensibility platform for Jenkins, right. So we’ve got over 300 plugins that will integrate with multiple technologies. And then like Frank was saying, multiple platforms from COS and even .Net, right. We have a lot of Microsoft integrations. So, yeah. I mean Jenkins is a great partner actually in the customer environment.
Shimel: Interesting. Guys, as I mentioned to you earlier, our time here goes so quick and we’re already coming up on 15 minutes. We’re gonna have to try to wrap up. But as I mentioned, I always like to ask our guests you know can you recommend a book to our audience that you know kind of a must read or should read. And Laurel, I’m gonna let you go first. Is there a particular book you’d recommend to our audience that they might find useful?
Dickson-Bull: So in the vein of DevOps, collaboration and teamwork that’s really important. Especially in agile development. There was a tool that I came across (that helps you) figure out your strengths. And then when you work with your _____.
Shimel: You know what Laurel —
Dickson-Bull: What?
Shimel: I think we missed you when you said the name of the book. Can you repeat it?
Dickson-Bull: Okay. It’s not a book.
Shimel: Oh, okay.
Dickson-Bull: It’s actually a survey or it’s a tool that you can use with your agile teams to figure out your various strengths. And it’s called Strengths Finder and it’s published by Gallup.
Shimel: Got it. Oh, very cool. We’ll see if we can get a link to that in the notes.
Dickson-Bull: Okay.
Shimel: Frank, how about you? Anything you could recommend to our audience?
Canihuante: Yeah. There’s so many books out there. But there’s one that I really like. It’s more of an author than a particular book. His name is Steve McConnell and he’s written the famous “Code Complete.” And I believe there’s a “Code Complete 2.” But there’s one other I really like. Actually two more. It’s called Rapid Development and the other book is called “Software Project Survival Guide.” These are from late 1990s. But if you read them it’s kind of like “The Phoenix Project” but 20 years ago. The same problems. The psychology of the software development world and how all that works. Really exciting stuff.
Shimel: Excellent. Well, Frank, before we close off and Laurel, I wanted to mention Frank, you are appearing at IBM Interconnect this year?
Canihuante: Yes. I am. I’ll be talking about our Travelers story at Interconnect.
Dickson-Bull: And we’ll be having you on a panel too, right Frank?
Canihuante: Oh, that’s correct. That’s gonna be on Wednesday. I forget the date.
Dickson-Bull: Yep. We have a few of our larger customers who have had success with DevOps joining us on a panel called, “DevOps-You’ve Got This.”
Shimel: Great. Sounds Great. We look forward to seeing it. I’m actually doing a panel there too called DevOps-It Takes a Village. So we could share notes Frank, while we’re out there. And Laurel, will you be attending Interconnect as well?
Canihuante: That’s awesome.
Dickson-Bull: I will be. I’ll be leaving that panel, DevOps-You’ve Got This. And then right before the conference, we have a full day workshop with customers from UrbanCode. So I’m organizing that now and we’ll be leading that on Sunday.
Shimel: Fantastic. All right. Well, Laurel Dickson-Bull of IBM UrbanCode. Frank Canihuante of Travelers, thank you for being our guests on this episode of DevOps Chat. Look forward to seeing you both out at IBM Interconnect the week of March 19th. And your panel Laurel that you’re organizing as well as Frank, you’re talking a little bit about your Travelers experience. And good luck as you continue to you know make the pipeline and DevOps happen at Travelers Frank. Thanks for telling us about it.
Dickson-Bull: Thanks Alan.
Canihuante: Thanks Alan.
Shimel: Thanks guys. This is Alan Shimel for DevOps.com. Thanks for being our guests today and we’ll see you on a DevOps Chat soon.
