John Esser, Director of Engineering Productivity, Ancestry.com

Track: Architectures you've always wondered about

Abstract: "Ancestry.com is the leading online family history website, with more than 2 million subscribers, many petabytes of genealogical records, and more than 160 services. As the subscriber base grew and Ancestry began to expand its customer base the need to innovate more rapidly became paramount and a focus on enabling continuous delivery emerged.Attempting to do continuous delivery not only requires changes in culture, technical practices, and infrastructure, but also requires a system architecture that supports it. The challenge at Ancestry was to migrate from a monolithic, coupled stack to a more service-oriented one that allowed teams to deploy code independently to the website without extensive coordination.  Just like Ancestry, many companies that want to do continuous delivery find they can’t because their system architecture is the bottleneck.
This presentation will discuss Ancestry.com’s transformation to a service-oriented architecture capable of supporting continuous delivery. We will discuss the architectural standards that guided the transformation and how we quantified architectural debt to determine which parts of the stack needed rework. Lastly, we will show how continuous delivery works in the context of the Ancestry.com architecture"

Track: Tutorial

Abstract:

Continuous Delivery is the practice of releasing high quality, business value to customers frequently and rapidly. Doing this effectively requires combining various practices and technologies in a highly automated way culminating in what we characterize as a “continuous delivery platform.” Many teams and organizations want to do continuous delivery, but find that combining the right pieces together in the right way is not so straightforward. What technologies are available and what can be used? How do you combine and structure them to create an effective continuous delivery pipeline?

This tutorial shows participants in a hands-on setting how to implement a working continuous delivery pipeline using key technologies—source control, build system, pipeline workflow system, tests, configuration management, and automated deployment—to release a new feature into “production.” We will use Git, Ant, Thoughtworks GO, xUnit, Selenium, Opscode Chef, and Amazon Web Services as representative technologies. As a bonus, we will also share some of our experiences dealing with cultural, organizational, and technical challenges while implementing a large-scale continuous delivery platform at Ancestry.com.

This tutorial is a great follow-on to Jez Humble’s “Continuous Delivery” tutorial on Monday. After learning from Jez about the fundamentals of continuous delivery, see how to implement a fully working pipeline from the architects of Ancestry.com’s large-scale continuous delivery platform.