2018 SugarCon Reflections: Sugar, DevOps, and IBM session

Hey there Sugar Developers! I’m Niegel Leoncio (@niegel), CRM Manager for Bishop-Wisecarver. This year is my 2nd SugarCon and I was privileged to be chosen as a Sugar Scholar.  I attended the session "Sugar, DevOps, and IBM" led by Vineel Nirogi and Julian Coldrey and I wanted to share a few take away that I took from this session.

It’s easy to get distracted by the different festivities within the conference, and this year, even distractions outside of the conference is much greater since we are in Vegas. That’s why every time I attend a big event like SugarCon, I would define a goal of why I am attending and will focus my energy towards that goal. This year, it was finding the right tools and best practices now that I am enhancing my development skills. Vineel and Julian’s session is the Las Vegas jackpot that I was waiting for! Although it was the last session on the last day, it’s packed with lot of great nuggets.

Julian started the session by painting the picture of the challenges that they have in the beginning. It’s surprising that a company as large as IBM, with 60,000 users worldwide, 5,000+ business partners and 200+ integrations and customizations, struggles with similar issues that smaller companies like us have, except on a larger scale. They struggle with delayed delivery and about 100 code defects per release. Their challenge is – “How do we deliver value to our customers radically faster?”

Julian shared this high-level strategy in approaching this problem.

  • Setting up a goal
  • Identifying the current state
  • Learn from teams better than you
  • Design your roadmap
  • Execute the plan

Challenging the status quo and thinking outside the box is a principle that they embraced. They asked themselves, what can we do to shorten the time of code deployment from 45 days to 1 day. It’s an impossible task for some, but their team is ready to break barriers. As of this writing, they were able to move from a 45-day release to a weekly release with about less than 10 defects per release. Impressive!

How did they do that? Vineel took over and talked about how DevOps changed Everything. Since the definition of DevOps differs from everyone, Vineel defined DevOps as a Culture that induces sub-conscious way of continuously redesigning the working style as a Team to increase the happiness index in Software Development Cycle. He further explained that DevOps is influenced by 4 areas. These 4 areas comprise of:

  • Tools
  • Culture
  • Practices
  • Behavior

Vineel also shared some of the DevOps tools that they are using in IBM:

  • Github® - For Source Code Management
  • Jenkins® - For Continuous Integration
  • SonarQube® - For Source Code Analysis
  • PHP Analysis - PhpUnit, PhpLint, SugarLint, Jasmine
  • Zabbix® - For Production Monitoring
  • Slack® - For Communication & Feedback
  • Ansible® - To convert Infrastructure as a Code
  • Docker® - For Containerizing the application

For someone who is brand new into Development, knowing tools that are used by experts helps me to get a good foundation in my learning curve. Learning from their journey from identifying their challenges to achieving what they have accomplished gives me a confidence in my quest in the dev world.

Check out the session’s slides below to see more of what they covered.
Sugar, DevOps, and IBM