Distance DevOps: the challenge of developing across offices and timezones

Panellists discuss the pitfalls of taking DevOps global

Scaling DevOps from small to large is not a linear process. In fact it's more of a step change. What worked smoothly on a small scale is likely to run into some serious turbulence as it scales up, particularly for large businesses.

There are a number of technical reasons for this, with a much larger selection of infrastructure and processes to be organised into templates, automated and coded, and many more operations having to run concurrently. But other challenges are far more human in nature. At its heart DevOps is a simple idea: break down the traditional walls between the developers and the operations staff and get them working together on a common task. In physical terms this often means everyone sitting in the same room or on the same bank of desks.

The desired camaraderie - or at least shared responsibility - is obviously much harder to achieve when the various parties are not just in different rooms but in different countries or even different timezones. This was one of the issues tackled by an experienced panel during the Computing DevOps Summit 2018.

Shipping company Maersk is in the early stages of the DevOps journey according to Ulf Kvistborg, head of development enablement. Initial efforts at introducing DevOps had to be thrown overboard he said.

Now we are trying to insource because we know it's easier and cheaper

"In 2016 we wanted to do DevOps and at that point the team moved to Romania and we said 'You are now DevOps' and that did not work at all. Now we are trying to insource because we know it's easier and cheaper and also it's easier to change the culture when ops and development are sitting together. People should sit together according to the work they're doing. If they don't sit together physically they should at least be in the same timezone."

Igor Murru, head of build management and release coordination at Centrica, agreed.

"It can be complex trying to run development offshore with ops in another location," he said. "If there is no interaction then no-one feels part of the action and no-one can directly see the result of their actions."

It's a basic problem of communication, he added. There is a lot of information to share and that's naturally much easier within the same office. Trying to do that across premises risks being "a waste of time and a waste of money".

As an outsourcing company Accenture's Natasha Wright, DevOps manager, sees the issue from the other side of the coin. She admitted that as a service provider her company might be guilty of making the problem worse, but she offered an example of how it can be made to work.

"Something I've seen work recently is where there was already DevOps, and we worked with all the parties involved to design a re-usable framework," she said.

"It's at a simple level, so templating everything, sharing it across GitHub repos and across the organisation, so everything including how you want your deployments and monitoring to be done, so that any developer can come in and see the standard you want. So if you want to continue using that outsourcer or bring it in house you've got that standard there."

As an additional plus, this approach can also make it cheaper and easier to change suppliers and avoid lock-in, she went on.

Aubrey Stearn, interim head of DevOps at Arcadia Group, said the personal touch, creating a feeling part of being part of a close group, is very important if DevOps is to work. While this is certainly harder when staff are not physically present, the task is not impossible with creative use of the right collaboration technology, she said.

It's really important to get that energy in the room

"It's really important to get that energy in the room. I work with whiteboards on nearly all the walls as they're incredibly useful. I have Teamups open so I can share my terminal and sometimes we use Visual Studio Live Share or Atom Teletype to share the workspace, and there's Skype so we have a conference room going for most of the day and we can pair up with somebody, so it's almost like being in the same room. It's very core for me to have people working on the central development at the same time."