Update: How the Company Portal Evolved the DevOps Journey slides from Tom’s presentation are available!
Internal company portals/intranets are cast away to the trash heaps of technical debt and forced homepages. So how did a “hand-crafted artisanal server” with code “carefully placed atop a multi-tiered system” turn into a crowning achievement of DevOps processes within an organization?
Often times, internal company portals and intranets are cast away to the relegated trash heaps of technical debt and enforced homepages. So how did a “hand-crafted artisanal server” with code “carefully, expertly, and manually placed atop the multi-tiered system” turn into a bastion of usability, functionality, and a crowning achievement of DevOps processes within an organization? The journey into these methods shaped the architectural decisions of our internal systems, and the portal shaped the processes we used to mature our methods. Our portal has become a Passport into the company communications, where any part of the business can learn more about any other area. In our travels, successes, and failures, we educate on the following topics:
High recoverability vs. high availability Single source of authentication vs. bespoke directories Shared knowledge vs. hero culture Continuous integration vs. manual processes Collaborative architecture vs. siloed decisions Blameless response vs. finger pointing Configuration management vs. runbooks.