DevOps in The Enterprise: Leading the Transformation at Quicken Loans

We can't wait for DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES16) happening in less than 2 weeks in San Francisco! One of CloudBees customers who will be speaking at the conference is Tyler Underwood, Sr. Application Engineer at Quicken Loans . Quicken Loans is a classic example of DevOps in the enterprise: large, complex organization, operating in a highly competitive, software-driven, regulated industry: namely Financial Services. When we hear people describe the "usual" pipeline from check-in to Production, we often hear of those (simplistic) 3-steps pipelines: CI > Test > Deploy. However, the realities are that the actual pipelines for today's mission-critical applications in complex organizations are anything but simplistic, and those 3 general stages often include dozens - if not hundreds - of tasks and processes at each stage, as the code is being promoted to be released. In addition, DevOps is not just about Dev and Ops anymore. It encompasses all stakeholders and roles that take part in the software delivery lifecycle- including QA, Networking, DBAs, Security, Infosec, business owners, and more. Check out, for example, the folks at Quicken Loans going through a value stream mapping exercise , to diagram their pipeline, figure out where the bottlenecks are, and what can be optimized on their pathway to production. Quite a long table - and that's just the half of it..  :) Lots of teams, processes and infrastructure are involved. Not so simple.

Tyler knows that (unlike the Quicken Loans "Push Button, Get Mortgage " campaign) implementing DevOps in the enterprise is nothing like "Push Button". DevOps is a journey, and – more than any shiny new technology – at its core, it’s all about the people. DevOps requires a cultural/mindset shift: it’s a new way of thinking, empowering, and collaborating that requires champions in the organization to drive this transformation.

Tyler has a passion for automating components related to the SDLC and believes in giving more autonomy and empowerment to developers. During his "DevOps Champions: Leading the Transformation at Quicken Loans " talk at DOES16, Tyler will share how Quicken Loans is using “The Three Ways” to accelerate their DevOps rollout in the organization. He will discuss their challenges and successes, how to move from “Heroes” to “Champions” to scale your DevOps adoption,  tactics for ensuring buy-in and participation both at the executive level and at the team-level, how to work with legacy applications, (and sometimes - “legacy” people), and other tips for champions to “grease the wheels” for moving your DevOps transformations forward. Ahead of the conference, we sat down with Tyler for a quick Q&A: QTell us briefly, what do you do at Quicken Loans? I lead the charge of providing release orchestration to all developers at Quicken Loans. I also assist in promoting best practices of CI and CD everywhere from development teams to infrastructure teams. QWhat are the biggest wins that Quicken Loans has achieved by implementing DevOps? We are still very much on our DevOps journey- but the biggest win was identifying a platform to handle automation of application creation and infrastructure as code. This was solved by bringing together IT professionals from every area of technology (QA’s, DBA’s, Devs, Systems Engineers, Leaders, Security, etc.) to identify a problem we had and collaborate to solve it. QWhat were your biggest challenges on your journey so far? Mostly, getting others to understand the mindset/cultural shift that is required. It is a new way of thinking. Communication is hard - but DevOps provides patterns for effective collaboration to bridge the gaps between Dev, Ops and other silos in the delivery processes and work together towards a shared goal. QCan you share a couple of tips and patterns that you’ve seen work to make DevOps adoption successful in your organization? Value Stream Mapping is key as a way to identify your current state of a process, point out where the waste is, and then identify would an ideal future state would look like and attempt to eliminate those wastes by means of automation. QWhat are you and your teams currently working on now?  Currently we are undergoing implementing an automation platform throughout our end-to-end pipeline to create an application, spin up a sandbox Virtual Machine, and set up any queues, firewalls needed for a developer to begin development all based off of metadata gathered. QWhen things get tough, what is your DevOps inspiration? / idea you turn to - as you continue on your journey? "The Three Ways: Principles Underpinning DevOps " by Gene Kim

Be sure to check out Tyler's talk at the conference , and catch up with him at the event for a chat on best practices for implementing DevOps in the enterprise. We're excited to see CloudBees Flow and our customers take center stage at DOES - and we're in EXCELLENT company!