Build & maintain complex distributed systems
October 1–2, 2017: Training
October 2–4, 2017: Tutorials & Conference
New York, NY

The art of the possible

Jonathan Moore (Comcast Cable)
2:25pm–3:05pm Tuesday, October 3, 2017
DevOps & Tools, Systems Engineering
 Location: Gramercy
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)

Who is this presentation for?

  • Managers, leaders, engineers, and operators

Prerequisite knowledge

  • A conceptual understanding of Agile approaches (e.g., Scrum and Kanban), frameworks (e.g., Spring), cloud environments (e.g., EC2), configuration management (e.g., Puppet, Ansible, and Terraform), and platforms (e.g., CloudFoundry)

What you'll learn

  • Explore the skills, practices, and tools that enabled Comcast's DevOps transformation

Description

How does a large 50-year-old company go from purchasing much of its technology and working with yearlong release cycles to building multiple products in-house and releasing daily? Jon Moore traces the changing set of tools, techniques, and attitudes that have powered (and still power) this transformation at Comcast over the last decade, mapping out a path you can follow in your own company.

Jon starts by describing the monolithic waterfall projects delivered by separate development, QA, and operations teams before exploring continuous delivery of service-oriented architectures by independent DevOps teams. Platform-wise, Jon covers everything from bare metal servers in private data centers to VMs in private and public clouds to container orchestration systems and platforms as a service. Practice-wise, he explores month-long Scrum sprints with manual testing and lean, Kanban-style workflows with substantial testing and operational automation. If there’s a popular open source project in this space, Comcast has probably used it.

Due to the ever-changing business and technology landscape and the length of time this journey has covered, you’ll likely recognize your company’s situation at some point in this story; you can use this understanding to map your own path forward.

Photo of Jonathan Moore

Jonathan Moore

Comcast Cable

Jon Moore is the chief software architect at Comcast Cable, where he focuses on delivering a core set of scalable, performant, robust software components for the company’s varied software product development groups. Jon specializes in the “art of the possible,” finding ways to coordinate working solutions for complex problems and deliver them on time. He is equally comfortable leading and managing teams and personally writing production-ready code and has a passion for software engineering, continuously learning, and teaching colleagues new ways to deliver working, maintainable software with ever-higher quality and ever-shorter delivery times. His interests include distributed systems, fault tolerance, building healthy and engaging engineering cultures, and Texas Hold’em. Jon holds a PhD in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania. He resides in West Philadelphia, although he was neither born nor raised there and does not spend most of his days on playgrounds.