Glue Work Makes the Dream Work Taylor Barnett (@taylor_atx) Glue DevOpsDays Texas
A presentation at DevOpsDays Texas 2021 in March 2021 in 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!
