DevOps Patterns and Antipatterns for Continuous Software Updates

So, you want to update the software for your user, be it the nodes in your K8s cluster, a browser on user’s desktop, an app in user’s smartphone or even a user’s car. What can possibly go wrong?

In this presentation, we’ll analyze real-world software update fails and how multiple DevOps patterns, that fit a variety of scenarios, could have saved the developers. Manually making sure that everything works before sending an update and expecting the user to do acceptance tests before they update is most definitely not on the list of such patterns.

Join us for some awesome and scary continuous update horror stories and some obvious (and some not so obvious) proven ideas for improvement and best practices you can start following tomorrow.

This presentation is a collection of failure stories about software updates with advice on how to prevent those in your systems. As usual with epic failures talks, it’s educational and a lot of fun.

We’ll start by reviewing what are the driving forces behind software updates, how do we update, and why some update multiple times a day while others only update once a year. We’ll continue to review some of the epic fails, including Google WiFi, Knight Capital, CloudFlare, Jaguar and others. The patterns we are going to suggest are Canary Deployments, Observability, Local rollbacks, Feature Flags, and others.

About Baruch Sadogursky

Baruch Sadogursky (@jbaruch) did Java before it had generics, DevOps before there was Docker, and DevRel before it had a name. He started DevRel at JFrog when it was ten people and took it all the way to a successful $6B IPO by helping engineers solve problems. Now Baruch keeps helping engineers solve problems but also helps companies help engineers solve problems. He is a co-author of the “Liquid Software” and “DevOps Tools for Java Developers” books, serves on multiple conference program committees, and regularly speaks at numerous most prestigious industry conferences, including Kubecon, JavaOne (RIP), Devoxx, QCon, DevRelCon, DevOpsDays (all over), DevOops (not a typo) and others. After a tenure of eleven years in JFrog DevRel, Baruch is the Principal Developer Productivity Engineering Advocate at Gradle.

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