Glad to be back in San Francisco for another DOXSFO event. We were fortunate to have four awesome speakers this time around on the topic of Continuous Integration. We started with Chloe Condon who spoke about why you need to stop using “the” staging server. Following that we had Amit Mishra and Kashyap Parikh gave us interesting insight on how GitHub combined with CI empowers rapid product delivery at Credit Karma. We closed out the evening with Edith Harbaugh and learned how and when to feature flag.

Check out their talks below. And we hope to see you at the next event!

WHY YOU NEED TO STOP USING THE STAGING SERVER
Chloe Condon, Developer Evangelist at Codefresh

Old staging methodology is broken for modern development. In fact, the staging server is left over from when we built monolithic applications. Find out why microservice architectures are driving ephemeral testing environments & why every sized dev shop should deliver true continuous deployment. Staging servers slow down development with merge conflicts, slow iteration loops, and manhour intensive processes. To build better software faster containers and infrastructure as code are key in 2017. Dev Ops professionals miss this talk at their own peril.

HOW GITHUB COMBINED WITH CI EMPOWERS RAPID PRODUCT DELIVERY AT CREDIT KARMA
Amit Mishra, Senior Build and Release Engineer & Kashyap Parikh, Director of Engineering at Credit Karma

Amit and Kashyap will discuss how GitHub and self service continuous integration (CI) helps Credit Karma rapidly deliver new features to over 60 million members. They will review how Credit Karma streamlined and scaled growing CI needs stemming from an army of engineers decomposing monolith into services. Are you a developer who wants to easily manage and customize CI and CD? Do you work in a team environment where everyone collaborates and depends on CI for automation and delivery of clean code to production? Amit and Kashyao will share a case study of how they evolved from a single, stand-alone CI instance to a self service, dockerized CI infrastructure combined with bots, webhooks and GitHub APIs. They will cover the features and powerful APIs of GitHub.com that were most valuable in this process, and how using GitHub.com freed up time previously spent on maintaining the underlying infrastructure. Credit Karma’s development teams are now empowered to spin up their own CI instances and add custom checks as part of their CI process to ensure quality code. This allows teams to focus simply on developing and delivering services. Participants will take away with an understanding of how to build an effective, scalable CI pipeline leveraging GitHub APIs to deliver your services into production.

HOW AND WHEN TO FEATURE FLAG
Edith Harbaugh CEO & Co-Founder at LaunchDarkly

Feature flags are a valuable DevOps technique to deliver better, more reliable software faster. Feature flags can be used for both release management (dark launches, canary rollouts, betas) as well as long term control (entitlement management, user segmentation personalization). However, if not managed properly, feature flags can be very destructive technical debt. Feature flags need to be managed properly with visibility and control to both engineering and business users.


This content came from DevOps Exchange San Francisco (#DOXSFO), a monthly DevOps Meetup in San Francisco.

If you’d like to speak at a future DOXSFO or join the Meetup, please visit the DOXSFO Meetup page.