Chef: Tools, Processes and Culture
This might come as a shock, but we live in a world of constant disruption and innovation.
There is more going on than just polaroid to digital film and taxies to Uber. As Marc Andresson rightly puts it; ‘software is eating the world’ and if we do not adapt we’ll die (specifically traditional corporates first. ED: And hippies, don’t forget the hippies!)
In a company “Transformation / Adoption” Change agents talk about adopting agile but never really about transforming the culture of a company to support a lean and agile mindset.
Benjamin Hinson, from Absa, shared how Absa was currently looking at transforming its culture to DevOps through a union of three simple practices and its Chef tools journey, in order to provide continuous delivery of customer value and innovation;
- Tools
- Process
- Culture
In the process of looking at the DevOps workflow, they realised they were searching for a silver bullet solution, that didn’t exist…yet. So, with the Practices of Mastery Absa started looking and working with Chef. This dramatically cut down their usual infrastructure provisioning process from 6 weeks to 30min! Assisting engineers to overcome and test code in a minute vs weeks.
The Results Of Using Chef to Automate Processes
- -Chef Automate allows a team to write and upload their own cookbooks with a workflow, then deploy it with Reason (an internally developed package).
- Chef allow Absa to increase its velocity with CICD
- Chef give the bank the ability to change/replace technologies as often as they wanted to with little effort.
- They never login into their environment beside to debug something, and if they find something they can fix it through code and never manually.
- Compliance made Audit happy, they can write their own policies now.
The use of Chef has increased the velocity and value Absa can produce as a bank and allowed people to be awesome. So in the end, by rewriting it’s own processes through software, the bank feels it has achieved its goal to produce product at velocity.
Download the presentation here.
Top Tips:
- You cannot take people through a DevOps journey, then through them back into silos and expect things to change.
- Manage your culture, not let culture manage you.
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