HATech DevOps Services general introduction

Editor's Notes

• #2: HATech is first and foremost in the business of helping our clients get to market faster with their online service updates, which leads to them being more innovative and therefore more competitive. We approach this through what we call a DevOps Transformation Process which involves breaking down the barriers between leadership, product, development, and operations teams. We teach them how to collaborate effectively. Above all else, aligning every-day activities very tightly with the business’ needs. As a full-service DevOps agency, we provide all the necessary expertise, technology skills and toolchains to make this happen, but we also focus is on the challenging cultural changes that need to take place within the organisation to allow transformation to take place. We embed a culture of openness and collaboration that creates an environment where alignment of business goals, innovation, effectiveness and competitiveness are all nurtured and their supporting processes and toolchains are matured through an ongoing iterative process. Our goal is always to build long term, ongoing partnerships with our clients, keeping their DevOps transformation on track and benefitting from ongoing process, knowledge and tooling innovation generated across HATech’s partner-client ecosystem.
• #3: We’re based in Las Vegas, and have presences in Reno, Malta (in the EU) with a 24x7 managed services support team in Belgrade (Serbia, SEE) We’re a relatively young business, we opened our doors in 2015 but we represent many years and a great deal of experience working with and for some very cool startups, best-in-class SMEs, as well as some very big names including IGT and CA Technologies. Since we started operating, we’ve expanded our team from 2 co-founders to 8 team members and we expect to increase to 20 by the end of 2016. From day 1 we’ve been financed by customer project income which we’re particularly proud of as it validates the value of our offering and allows us to focus on growing the business in line with our very specific vision of the future of DevOps as we contribute to making that vision a reality. Our core consulting services focus on DevOps-oriented business transformation, helping businesses to be more Innovative and Competitive..  Our Engineering services focus on providing full-stack engineering augmentation to customer teams, with a good blend of generalists, specific domain expertise and out-of-the-box thinkers. A key component of our success is our 24/7 global Managed Service capability. This blends resources across experience levels & geographic locations to ensure a timely response to customer issues around the clock. The service includes DataDog monitoring and OpsGenie alerting and resolution management combined with our JIRA-based ticketing and customer-facing knowledge management portal. One area of business that we’re very excited about is our DevOps Pipeline Manager. This combines our constantly-evolving automation patterns into a cloud-based service which manages the entire DevOps pipeline across many cloud platforms including hybrid deployments. Our deployment patterns rely heavily on Self-Learning Environments and Automation to ensure that the entire process requires a minimum of hands-on attention. We work a lot with container-based microservice Architectures, primarily based on Docker. Together, these principles are the key to achieving Secure, Reliable, Repeatable and Scalable cloud deployments.
• #4: HATech is vendor-neutral and is driven solely by a passion to find the right solution to answer your business needs. It doesn’t matter to us which platform you’re moving from or to, or which services you need to combine, or what technology you’re using. Our technology agnostic approach allows us to apply ‘Patterns & Tooling’ that we develop and continually update as we build out new features and capabilities, through internal product development and future client engagements. Reselling individual vendor technologies is not a driver for our business model. That being said, our active partnerships reflect the hybrid and diverse nature, and our expertise within today’s DevOps, cloud, containers & microservices technology landscape. Needless to say, integrating toolchains and automating hybrid pipelines towards Continuous Delivery is a big part of every client engagement that we work on. Our Hybrid-centric vision means that we are focused on recommending the right tooling combinations and platform choices for our clients on a case-by-case basis.
• #5: Our Transformation process begins with a Discovery Phase where we begin by clearly articulating the business needs. Through a series of assessments, we identify cultural challenges and silo targets, existing technical capabilities and how to maximize them. We then carry out an exploratory dive into the client’s applications and development pipeline. We provide a report across the four focus areas of Culture, People, Technology & Processes together with an overview of the current DevOps maturity baseline. Having gained a clear overview of the business, The Analyze stage is all about working out where we can add real value with quick results. We’ll identify how we can drive cultural changes, bridge skills gaps, mitigate technical debt and eliminate technical and organisational weaknesses through pragmatic change.We then deliver a detailed maturity plan with defined goals. We also help define processes and responsibilities between the client, HATech and any 3rd parties involved. We then Design a change path that clearly defines the steps for the client to move forward, focusing on people, technology, products, architecture and processes. Our top-down milestone driven plans are absolutely focused on meeting the business’ needs identified during the Discovery phase and we use an agile approach to defining success criteria at each development stage. During the Execution phase, we operate to a sprint driven development process coordinated by one of our scrum masters with the client as the product owner. Architectural decisions, development, testing, documentation and releases, are iterated with total visibility allowing rapid direction changes to help our clients stay highly agile and competitive. We Empower our customers by providing continual training and mentoring leading up to handover where the client takes over running the day to day processes. At the end of an engagement a full runbook is shared detailing the processes and procedures to help the client remain successful. When relevant to that continued success we also work with clients to develop a recruitment plan and/or an HATech managed services plan to provide ongoing support for their non-core activities. Our services generally do not end at handover. Through our managed services and ongoing consultancy we continue to contribute strategic advice, tooling and automation pattern updates and access to our evolving knowledge base driven by internal R&D and contributions from our ecosystem of client-partners. Our goal is always to build long term, ongoing partnerships with our clients, keeping their DevOps transformation on track and benefitting from ongoing process, knowledge and tooling innovation.
• #7: Within a cultural framework, HATech defines DevOps as the ability to deliver from Product vision, with reliability, into a production environment multiple times per day, in an automated and repeatable fashion. Or in other words, Continuous Delivery. Transitioning to this state is not easy and requires the organization to move through multiple stages before it arrives at this level of agility and automation. Whether the goal is to adopt a true DevOps pattern for a particular product, or bring the whole organisation up to the same level of maturity at the same time, our vision for most clients is to execute in line with an agreed maturity model starting at a high level with the ‘Continuous What?’ Model. Embedding a DevOps culture within an organization cannot happen without a plan on how to form the culture by influencing behavior. You can't 'build' a culture, it is formed through the actions and character of the organization. The ‘Continuous What?’ DevOps model maps out the strategic high level milestones towards reaching the goal of automated delivery of features and product needs in a timely and repeatable fashion. Each of these high-level milestones are then broken down into pipelines that are iterated to achieve the tactical goals that HATech works with our clients to define throughout any engagement. A key component of the journey through the model from Continuous Integration, to Continuous Deployment to Continuous Delivery, is mapping the DevOps Maturity baseline at the beginning of the process. HATech carries this out during the Discovery phase and then works with the client to put in place a skills development plan to bring the team up to the required maturity level across all measurements at the appropriate stage in the process.
• #8: During a typical 5-day Discovery Engagement, we offer a ½ day free pre-engagement consultation which can be carried out by phone but we always prefer to do on-site with the client. This is a great opportunity for the client to evaluate our approach and validate that it fits with their business needs before any commitment to proceed. During the 5 day engagement a senior HATech consultant/architect will spend a minimum of 3 days on-site conducting assessments, interviews and an exploratory dive into the client’s applications and development pipeline. The remaining two days will be spend remotely documenting the written assessment, DevOps maturity ratings and an evaluation, timeframe and budget estimates for a starter project identified with the client. At the end of this short engagement, the client will have a clear understanding of: How we work Where key improvements can be made in their organisation (culture, people, processes & technology) What immediate next steps they can take to deliver maximum value within the quickest timeframe How long the next phase in their transformation will take and how much it will cost Where HATech can add value, bridge gaps and provide a tailored DevOps service to support ongoing projects
• #9: SheKnows Media is a leading women’s lifestyle media platform with 92 million unique visitors every month. That puts them number 26 in the top 50 U.S Digital Media Properties (according to comScore.com) just ahead of Pinterest. When SheKnows engaged HATech, the challenge was to migrate their VM-based environment from Joyent to AWS. As part of this ongoing engagement, HATech designed and implemented a development & AWS deployment pipeline, heavily utilizing Docker container services with automation to push from dev-test through to production. A key feature of the pipeline delivered is that SheKnows developers can run the exact same containers locally as they run in production. HATech completed the migration of SheKnows first application to AWS within 10 days, with customers experienced zero downtime during the switchover. SheKnows have benefited from significant infrastructure costs savings as well as large resource savings due to the deployment pipeline automation delivered by HATech. HATech continues to provide DevOps services to SheKnows for migration of additional applications to Docker + AWS in addition to providing a leadership advisory role in sprint planning, staff augmentation and monitoring & alerting for production AWS environments.
• #10: Exactuals are a rapidly growing software-as-a-service startup whose platform automates residuals payments in the media and entertainment industry. When Exactuals engaged HATech, the challenge was to replace a failing deployment pipeline for AWS. As part of the engagement, HATech replaced a complex Puppet pipeline that after 18 months could not deploy reliably to AWS. We designed and implemented a One-Click Jenkins deployment pipeline solution that orchestrated 28 microservices that we re-architected to utilize Docker containers. Using our pipeline, Exactuals developers were able to easily spin up entire environment stacks both locally and on AWS. HATech completed the first automated release of Exactuals’ application on AWS within 5 days, with the actual upgrade process taking only 30 seconds to complete. Exactuals have benefited from HATech unblocking critical development and deployment pipelines as well as enabling them to focus on innovating their products, rather than managing upgrade deployments. HATech continues to provide DevOps services to Exactuals by providing a leadership advisory role in sprint planning and staff augmentation engineering & automation services.
• #11: Wedgies.com is an online Polling and Survey platform that lets users of all sizes conduct polls and count votes in real-time. Their SaaS offering is used for school elections for class president, right up to the State of the Union address in 2015, 2015 GOP nominations and the Wall Street Journal. When Wedgies engaged HATech, the challenge was to help them with the migration from ‘outage-prone-under-high-load’ Heroku environment to AWS and also to provide guidance on how to improve their DevOps understanding and patterns, specifically related to AWS. Covering only a 7 day engagement, HATech stood up Wedgies’ first app in AWS in only 3 days with 20 minutes downtime for the switchover due mainly to switching their production MongoDB database from Compose to AWS. During the rest of the engagement period, HATech also helped Wedgies with embedding a DevOps culture, rearchitecting to Docker, building deployment automation and carried out self-reliance training before handover. Since HATech moved Wedgies to AWS they have not had a single major outage. Wedgies credit HATech’s guidance around adopting appropriate AWS prescribed architectures as contributing to this success metric. HATech’s approach to adopting a DevOps Culture is credited with promoting the right approach towards automation within the Wedgies DevOps team.