Some of you have most probably worked for (or currently work for) a small software business. There are many such businesses scattered around the globe and they all have one thing in common: they need to move fast to survive and they need to entice and retain customers at all costs. They do this by delivering what the customer wants just before the customer needs it. Deliver too soon and you may have wasted money on building solutions that the customer decides they no longer need, as their priorities or simply their minds have changed. Deliver too late and someone else may well have taken your customer—and more importantly your revenue—away from you. The important keyword here is deliver.
As previously mentioned, ACME systems started out in humble beginnings; the founders had the big vision and could see a gap in the market for a web-based solution. They had entrepreneurial spirit and managed to obtain backing from a few parties who injected the life blood of all small businesses—cash.
They then went about sourcing some local, keen, and talented engineers and set about building the web-based solution that bridged the gap, which they had seen before anyone else could.
At first, it was slow going and hard work; lots of pre-sales prototypes needed to be built in a hurry—most of which never saw the light of day—some went straight into production. After many long days, long nights, long weeks, long weekends, and long months, things started to come together. The customer base started to grow and the orders started rolling in; so did the revenue. Soon the number of employees were in double figures and the founders had become directors.
This is all well and good but what has this got to do with CD or DevOps? Well everything really. The culture, default behaviors, and engineering practices of a small software house are what would be classed as pretty good in terms of CD and DevOps. For example:
There are next to no barriers between developers and the Operations teams—in fact, they are generally one and the same
Developers normally have full access to the production environment and can closely monitor their software
All areas of the business are focused on the same thing, that is, getting software into the production environment as quickly as possible and delighting customers
Speed of delivery is of the essence
When things break, everyone swarms around to help fix the problem
The software evolves quickly and features are added in incremental chunks
The ways of working are normally very agile
There is a reason for stating that the culture, default behaviors, and engineering practices of a small software house would be classed as pretty good rather than ideal. This is because there are many flaws in the way a small software house has to operate to stay alive:
Corners will be cut to hit deadlines, which will compromise software design and elegance
Engineering best practices will be compromised to hit deadlines
Testing will not be in the forefront of the developer's mind and even if it were, there may not be enough time to work in a test-driven development way
Source and version control is not used religiously
With unrestricted access to the production environment, tweaks and changes can be made to the infrastructure
Software releasing will be mainly manual and most of the time an afterthought of the overall system design
At times a rough and ready prototype may well become production code without the opportunity for refactoring
To emphasize this, let's have a look at a selection of typical conversations between the Development and Operations teams and the management team of ACME systems.
We'll now have a look at the software delivery process for ACME systems Version 1.0, which, to be honest, shouldn't take too long.
The following diagram gives an overview of the simple process used by ACME systems to deliver software. It's simple, elegant (in a rough and ready kind of way), and easy to communicate and understand.
Overview of ACME Version 1.0 software delivery process
Let's move forward a few years and see how ACME systems is doing and gain some insight into the benefits and pitfalls of being the leader of the field.