Bring Devs Closer to Production

Abstract:

"If we're deploying to CentOS, why are devs running the app on OS X?"

We strive to create shared environments which mirror Production as closely as possible. At the same time it's not uncommon for a developer's workstation environment to be very far from Production. In this talk we'll learn how teams can pull production-like environments all the way back to a developer's workstation while still remaining productive, using tools like Vagrant and Chef.

We'll also share some of the benefits we see for teams that do this. The whole team gain a better understanding of how their system operates 'for real'. Everyone is empowered to make infra and config changes when everyone's local development environment is as useful for testing infrastructure changes as code changes. New team members and members of other teams can setup their own personal copy of the system in minutes.

Speaker:

Pete is a lead consultant at ThoughtWorks based in SF, where he has spent a fair amount of time helping build CD pipelines which stretch from ideas to production. His recent interests include using tools to help devs embrace infrastructure as a key part of their app.