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How NBC Universal sped delivery and cut costs with DevOps

If businesses find the success with #DevOps that NBC Universal has, it’s safe to say that it’ll be sticking around.
At IBM InterConnect Monday, Angel Diaz, IBM vice president of developer technology and advocacy, told the crowd, “We are living in a technology-fueled business revolution.”
He was referring, of course, to DevOps, the approach to building software and applications that breaks down barriers between developers, IT staff and operation managers in an agile, iterative environment. It’s about tapping into the collective skill of what Diaz refers to as “the business technical pulse.”
“It’s all about the people; the mastery of the machine and the method,” Diaz said.
One organization that has mastered the machine and the method is NBC Universal. John Comas, who manages the company’s platform DevOps, was on hand to share his account of his company’s journey.
The approach
In a joint session at InterConnect titled “DevOps: The New Reality for Enterprise Transformation,” Comas said his company implemented DevOps to “modernize our technology to align with the business strategy.”
“DevOps gives us the agility to keep up with changes in the marketplace,” he said, “and it enables us to instantly respond to the ever-changing business requirements. Most importantly, it allows us to remain competitive with our corporate rivals.”
He told the crowd that he approached a DevOps culture at NBC Universal through what are commonly referred to as “The 5 C’s”:

With DevOps, @NBCUniversal is “developing faster and more efficiently than ever and at much lower costs,” says John Comas. #ibminterconnect pic.twitter.com/JgPXmzs8eP
— IBM Cloud (@IBMcloud) March 20, 2017

Continuous integration
Continuous delivery
Continuous testing
Continuous feedback
Continuous monitoring

“At its core, DevOps takes software development and systems integration and combines them together using agile methodology,” Comas said.
In his team’s continuous integration, developers commit code to the software configuration management and merge with the main line multiple times per day. Every commit results in a build. In continuous delivery, the same build is deployed to every environment, from development to production, and the team delivers smaller releases more often.
With continuous feedback, his team can provide “the pulse of the application development project” in real time, Comas said.
Continuous monitoring gives his team the ability to immediately alert the development team of any operational disruptions.
Comas said that NBC Universal’s software delivery life cycle was built on and powered through the IBM UrbanCode suite.
“It’s what I like to call ‘the central nexus of our DevOps,’” he said.
“We want to provide our consumers with the most comprehensive, robust, state-of-the-art, bleeding-edge DevOps capabilities in the industry,” he added. “We want to build software as efficiently as possible.”
The results
With DevOps, Comas said his team improved the quality of the code. He said the team is developing code “faster and more efficiently than ever and at much lower costs.”
His organization also brought together siloed teams: software development, quality assurance and technology operations.
But the real proof is in the numbers. For its Universal Orlando project, DevOps helped the business:

Reduce app deployment time from 2.5 weeks to 20 minutes
Reduce time for 1,000 test suite from 6-8 weeks to three hours
Instantly provision production-like test environments with Skytap through UrbanCode

Get started on your own journey
If you’re looking to get started with DevOps, the Bluemix Garage Method combines practices from design thinking, agile development, lean startup and DevOps to build innovative solutions.
“Anyone can learn from the experiences that we’ve had at building this stuff together along with the open source communities,” Diaz said, “by understanding the practices in the Bluemix Garage Method.”
Find out more about how you can get started with the Bluemix Garage Method here.
The post How NBC Universal sped delivery and cut costs with DevOps appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
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Come prove your building skills with WebSphere

Remember how awesome your building block structures were as a kid? Sure, others followed the instructions and built “by-the-book” pieces, but not you. Your designs were completely original, and therefore the greatest contraptions of all, complete with trap doors and aircraft vehicles that could transform into submarines.
You didn’t know this then: that life has led you to a career in microservices. That’s why you have what it takes to build the best original building block creation of all time.
You just have to prove it. Here’s how: Visit the IBM WebSphere booth at the concourse during InterConnect 2017 to participate in our WebSphere microservices building contest.
Wait, what are microservices?
Glad you asked. Microservices are an architecture style in which developers can build large, complex software applications using many small components known as microservices. They are independently deployable and loosely coupled, making each service easier to develop, deploy and scale. These characteristics are why microservices architectures are gaining traction for developing and delivering cloud-native workloads across public, private, and hybrid cloud application environments.
That’s great, but what do microservices have to do with toy building blocks?
The toy building blocks represent a microservices architecture, which are, by nature, comprised of loosely coupled, smaller pieces, making each service easier to scale and the ability to develop and deploy services independently. IBM WebSphere Application Server makes it easy to build and deploy these microservices across any cloud environment.
How does the contest work?

Starting Monday, 20 March, come to the IBM WebSphere booth at the concourse anytime during concourse hours to build your original creation. All toy building blocks will be provided. You can come back as often as you’d like — during concourse hours, no sneaking in at midnight — to make modifications to your structure.
The contest will close at 1 PM PT on Wednesday, 22 March. No building will happen after this time. From there, our panel of judges will decide the winners. Creations will be judged on originality, may only use the toy building blocks provided, fit within an 18”x18” space and be no taller than four feet.
The winners will be announced starting at 3 PM on Wednesday, 22 March on the open mic stage at the IBM WebSphere booth. The decisions of the contest judges are final. No takebacks.
Let’s get to what’s important — what can I win?
Our top four winners will receive two floor seat wristbands to Wednesday night’s Zac Brown Band concert.
Social Superstar Award
You don’t have to be a building master to win prizes. Instead, you can be our Social Superstar and still win two floor seat wristbands to Zac Brown Band. Here’s how to win: post a picture of your creation, using our hashtag #WASBuild and #IBMInterConnect. Your name will be added to a drawing for the Social Superstar prize each time you do.
Bring your A-game, originality, and creativity and come visit the IBM WebSphere booth during Concourse hours:
Monday, 20 March:  5 PM – 7 PM PT
Tuesday, 21 March: 11 AM – 7:30 PM PT
Wednesday, 22 March: 9 AM – 5 PM PT (contest closes at 1 PM PT)
The post Come prove your building skills with WebSphere appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
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Open Technology Summit focuses on contributors

The Open Technology Summit, now in its fifth year, has become an annual state of the union for the established and budding open source projects that IBM supports.
The conclusion drawn at Sunday’s OTS during IBM InterConnect in Las Vegas is that the state of open tech is strong and getting stronger.
The event brought together leaders from some of today’s top open source #cloud projects: #OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, the Linux Foundation, JS Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation, plus the IBM leaders that support these projects.
“The open source community is only as good as the people who are contributing,” Willie Tejada, IBM Chief Developer Advocate, told the capacity crowd.

“We’ve been systematically building an open innovation platform — cloud, #cognitive, etc.” @angelluisdiaz https://t.co/HHMqWmi3v4 #ibmots pic.twitter.com/945FkRbkZg
— IBM Cloud (@#IBMcloud) March 20, 2017

Judging by the success stories shared on stage, contributor quality appears to be quite high. In short, the open source community is thriving.
Finding success in the open
The Linux Foundation has become one of the great success stories in open source, thanks largely to the huge number of contributors it has attracted. In his talk, the organization’s executive director, Jim Zemlin, told the crowd that across its various projects, contributors add a staggering 10,800 lines of code, remove 5,300 lines of code and modify 1,875 lines of code per day.
Zemlin called open source “the new norm” for software and application development.

&8220;Open source is now the new norm for software development.” – @jzemlin IBMOTS #ibminterconnect https://t.co/y3V3IGfcTK pic.twitter.com/83k9yLdJdf
— IBM Cloud (@IBMcloud) March 20, 2017

Cloud Foundry Foundation executive director Abby Kearns stressed her organization’s commitment to bringing forward greater diversity among its community.
“When I think about innovation, I think about diversity,” said Kearns, who took over as executive director four months ago. “We have the potential to change our industry, our countries and the world.”
Like Cloud Foundry, the OpenStack community has seen tremendous growth in its user community thanks to increased integration and cooperation with other open source communities. OpenStack Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce and Lauren Sell, vice president of marketing and community services, shared their community’s pithy, tongue-in-cheek motto:

&8220;In 2014, there was 323 developers contributing to OpenStack. In 2016, we had 531.&8221; @jbryce IBMOTS ibminterconnect pic.twitter.com/6PxYzrVxsL
— IBM WebSphere (@IBMWebSphere) March 20, 2017

The community, which aims to create a single platform for bare metal servers, virtual machines and containers, has seen 5 million cores deployed on it. Contributors have jumped from 323 in 2014 to 531 in 2016.
Sell echoed several of the other speakers, when she noted that we’re living in a “multi-cloud world,” and that open technologies are enabling it.
IBM: Contributors, collaborators, solution providers
While it’s well known that IBM has helped start and lead many of the open source communities that it supports, the company also offers a robust set of unique capabilities around these technologies. The company is constantly working to expand its offerings around open technologies.
For example, IBM Cloud Platform Vice President and CTO Jason McGee previewed the announcement that Kubernetes is now available on IBM Bluemix Container Service.
“This service lets us bring together the power of that project and all of the amazing technology in the engine with Docker and the orchestration layer with Kubernetes and combine it with the power of cloud-based delivery,” McGee said.
David Kenny, senior vice president, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, also spoke about “the power of the community to move the technology faster and to consume it and learn from it.”
“We’re very much committed as IBM to be participants,” he said. “Certainly IBM Cloud and IBM Watson are two pretty big initiatives at IBM these days, and both of those have come together around the belief that open source is a key part of our platform.”

“IBMCloud and Watson have come together around the belief that #opensource is a key part of our platform.” &8211; @davidwkenny IBMOTS pic.twitter.com/gU9DCzMsoC
— Kevin J. Allen (@KevJosephAllen) March 20, 2017

Moving forward as a community
Looking toward the future of open tech, it was clear that its success will depend on the next generation of contributors.
Tejada went so far as to call the open source movement a religion. “The most important piece is to understand the core premises of the religion.” He identified those as:

Embrace the new face of development
Acknowledge and adapt to the new methodologies of application development
Seize the opportunity to do more with less at an accelerated rate

For more on IBM work in open technology, visit developerWorks Open.
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