Episode 47: Harald Gottlicher of Bosch Takes a DevOps Journey Without Making Enemies

What does a DevOps transformation look like at a hardware company? That’s the questions Harald Gottlicher, software architect at Bosch, answers in Episode 47 of DevOps Radio. Harald and host Brian Dawson dive right into the specifics of the process the team at Bosch underwent and the problems solved by implementing continuous integration/continuous delivery.

While Harald still feels the company is somewhere between Dev and Ops, utilizing DevOps processes has allowed Bosch to improve the legacy process with changes to a single build update to break down monolithic releases. (This was much easier than building and rebuilding these systems that were over one million files and 30 gigabytes!) Harald explains that as a result of moving processes towards continuous delivery (CD), Bosch has seen increased productivity, faster development cycles and quicker feedback, setting the stage to impact the customer and the business.

A key part of this transformation was the transition from outdated tools and rigid processes to a complete CD landscape. Harald says tools are crucial in the CD process, but since people are often married to their version control systems and unwilling to upgrade or try new tools, they are outdated. For Bosch the migration finished four years ago, but the idea had started between seven and eight years ago. The moral of this story is not to pick a tool just for the sake of picking a tool; pick what best fits your need.

As we all know though, DevOps is more than just the tools, it’s also about the culture. Harald says it’s imperative to make a lot of friends. Successful transformation begins when you get to know the team and convince people from the beginning why this is important. Processes, and how they are working and why they make sense, need to be understood before implementation begins. In turn, leaders need to listen to the team and incorporate feedback into the development cycle. For more on the importance of this in the DevOps process, you can check out his slides for DevOps World | Jenkins World Nice,Enemy Mine: Migration without Enemies .

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Additional resources

• Watch a webinar on getting to a state of transformation

• Learn about best practices driving automation through CI/CD

• Get an overview of DevOps and discover why it's not just a fad