A presentation at DevOpsDays Texas 2021 by Taylor Barnett
Glue Work Makes the Dream Work Taylor Barnett (@taylor_atx) Glue DevOpsDays Texas
Hypothesis: People dislike glue work because of bad, past experiences @transposit @taylor_atx
The road to improving our experience of glue work has been narrow, slow, and with many road blocks @transposit @taylor_atx
What is Glue? @transposit Glue @taylor_atx
Glue (verb): To integrate different parts of a system together that would otherwise be incompatible @transposit @taylor_atx
“…the less glamorous - and often less-promotable - work that needs to happen to make a team successful.” -Tanya Reilly @transposit @taylor_atx
Glue can be a lot of different activities Human Design Code @transposit @taylor_atx
Patchwork of tools and services @transposit @taylor_atx
Glue is complex @transposit @taylor_atx
We often to have to solve for glue ourselves @transposit @taylor_atx
“And you may ask yourself, “Well… how did [we] get here?” -Talking Heads @transposit @taylor_atx
First there was AWS… @transposit @taylor_atx
Software supply chain @transposit @taylor_atx
We’ve solved old problems, but discovered new problems @transposit @taylor_atx
APIs, APIs, APIs @taylor_atx
Where do we go from here? @transposit @taylor_atx
Learn how to “outsource” well @transposit @taylor_atx
Vendor Engineering @transposit @taylor_atx
Compatibility Use cases Team buy-in @transposit @taylor_atx
Ask good questions to gauge compatibility and fit What friction you can deal with and what is a dealbreaker? @transposit @taylor_atx
Calculate and qualify the cost to develop and operate Remove as much as labor as possible @transposit @taylor_atx
Consider the true cost of ownership and advocate internally Manage up to executive and finance teams @transposit @taylor_atx
Reward team members for doing this work well @transposit @taylor_atx
@transposit @taylor_atx
! @transposit 503 Service Unavailable @taylor_atx
S3 Outage in 2017 @transposit @taylor_atx
When they break, we could break @transposit @taylor_atx
Failure will happen, learn to handle it gracefully @transposit @taylor_atx
Things will go down, but how do we handle it and grow? @transposit @taylor_atx
This is where the interesting problems live! @transposit @taylor_atx
Problems like: - Connections
Some services or endpoints are offline: - Don’t disable everything! - Frontend circuit breakers - Non-critical services should fail silently, disable others intelligently - Don’t lead users down a broken path, disable what you can - Set expectations @transposit @taylor_atx
Authentication: - 6+ different common authentication types - How are they all being handled safely? @transposit @taylor_atx
Connections: - What if someone has a slower data connection? - How do things load or fail? - Progressive data presentation @transposit @taylor_atx
Rate limiting: - API retry issues - Requires some restraint and strategy - When do you tell the user? ! @transposit 429 Too Many Requests @taylor_atx
Decoupling: - Decoupling services from vendors - Important that your glue code isn’t so tightly glued - API calls directly to an API without a thin wrapper make it hard to switch vendors @transposit @taylor_atx
Find ways to abstract the glue code @transposit @taylor_atx
SDKs, libraries HashiCorp Terraform, Waypoint Netlify @transposit @taylor_atx
Comprehensive Developer Native Elegant Multi-runtime Multi-vendor -Stephen O’Grady, Redmonk @transposit @taylor_atx
This is the future of Glue with better developer and operator experiences @transposit @taylor_atx
Focus @transposit @taylor_atx
We get to reach for the Dream @transposit @taylor_atx
Learn how to “outsource” well Failure will happen, learn to handle it gracefully Find ways to abstract the glue code @transposit @taylor_atx
Thanks, y’all! Twitter: @taylor_atx Email: taylor@transposit.com See you in Discord for Q&A, and in #transposit!
Today, our systems are made up of a patchwork of tools and services from different companies. We no longer need to be experts outside of our core business model. Companies now make it relatively accessible and affordable to use everything as a service, rather than creating everything from scratch. The days of running your own SMTP server are gone; there’s an API for that. But how did we get here, and where do we go from here? Most importantly, how do we connect this patchwork of tools and services together without wanting to pull our hair out while also dealing with a whole new set of challenges with external services?
In this talk, we will discuss the importance of glue work today, which is often both underutilized and undervalued, while developing and operating software compared to previous decades. We will also learn how to elevate glue work’s value and utilization and explore how to use glue work to improve the development or operational experience.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
Tanya Reilly popularized the term “glue work” in this talk and got me thinking a lot about the non-code (in the very literal sense) part to glue work. I recommend watching it!
When I read this piece by Charity Majors, it confirmed a lot of the trends I had been seeing in infrastructure work and across the industry as a whole. If you want to dig into how to prepare for this new future, read this post.
I reference the “five adjectives that will describe the next generation of developer experience” from this post in the talk.
Anyone who is paid attention to APIs in the last decade has seen the rise of Twilio. One of the Twilio’s co-founders and CEO, Jeff Lawson’s piece on the software supply chain is both interesting and nicely lays out why “component software is the next big leap in the industry’s evolution.”
The OpenAPI Specification (formerly known as Swagger) defines a standard, programming language-agnostic interface description for HTTP APIs, which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of a service without requiring access to source code, additional documentation, or inspection of network traffic. When properly defined via OpenAPI, a consumer can understand and interact with the remote service with a minimal amount of implementation logic. Similar to what interface descriptions have done for lower-level programming, the OpenAPI Specification removes guesswork in calling a service.
You’ve got the building blocks, we’ve got the glue. Bring your entire stack together and replace static wiki pages with codified processes. From incident response to service requests, Transposit helps teams operate like a finely-tuned machine. Also, where I work. :)
Coming back again in Fall 2021! OpenAPI Initiative’s API Specifications Conference (ASC) is a place for API practitioners to come together and discuss the evolution of API technology. ASC includes cutting edge technology keynotes and sessions that chart the future of APIs with in-depth specification and standards discussions. OpenAPI Specifications, RAML, Blueprint, gRPC, OData, JSON Schema, GraphQL, AsyncAPI and other formats will all be topics at the event, enabling attendees to get familiar with these formats and discuss how to use them in practice.
Here’s what was said about this presentation on social media.
