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Zubin Irani & Brandon CipesAccelerate Your Digital Transformation Through Automation, Monitoring, and the Cloud DevOps for Media and Entertainment DevOps for Media and Entertainment Comp

Zubin Irani & Brandon Cipes

Accelerate Your Digital Transformation Through Automation, Monitoring, and the Cloud

DevOps for Media and Entertainment

DevOps for Media and Entertainment

Compliments of

Zubin Irani and Brandon Cipes

DevOps for Media and Entertainment

Accelerate Your Digital Transformation

through Automation, Monitoring,

and the Cloud

Boston Farnham Sebastopol TokyoBeijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo

Beijing

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DevOps for Media and Entertainment

by Zubin Irani and Brandon Cipes

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Table of Contents

DevOps in Media and Entertainment 1

New Media Was First in DevOps 2

Digital Disruption in Media and Entertainment 4

DevOps Defined: Six Key Competencies 6

Advancing Beyond Agile 7

Benefits and Limits of DevOps 8

CI/CD 10

Dynamic Cloud Infrastructure 14

Automated Testing 17

Security Automation/DevSecOps 18

Seven DevSecOps Imperatives 20

Monitoring 22

Beginning Your DevOps Journey 24

DevOps and the Next Media and Entertainment Disruptor 26

iii

DevOps in Media and

Entertainment

Traditional media and entertainment businesses are struggling withdigital transformation on a more dramatic scale than those in anyother industry Media and entertainment executives who have beenaround long enough have experienced the move from runningentirely on analog data and devices to becoming wholly digital com‐panies More recently, they’ve made the rapid leap from embracingsoftware products as a tool to realizing that software—operating inthe cloud like a living, breathing organism needing constant care

and feeding—is their product And they’ve seen the fundamental

definition of what a media and entertainment business is expand asmethods of content creation and consumption have exploded.And the changes are still coming More than 70 percent of mediaand entertainment industry executives who responded to a poll lastyear said they anticipated “moderate or massive digital disruption”

in the next 12 months Whatever their sector—movies, music, gam‐ing, television, radio, or publishing—the leaders of these businessesknow that speed and agility are crucial to keeping up with the pace

of technological change, consumer expectations, and their competi‐tors

We believe that the key to enabling this level of agility is a highly col‐laborative and communicative relationship between Development

and IT Operations The merged term DevOps symbolizes the inte‐

gration that needs to occur between the two departments Newmedia leaders such as Facebook and Google are built upon DevOps.And among traditional media and entertainment businesses, themost progressive have already adopted DevOps In this report, we

1

focus on a few of them as case studies, including Netflix, Disney, andSony.

Across all industries, 80 percent of “global 1,000” organizations areexpected to implement DevOps by 2019 And yet, as many as 60percent of leaders in organizations of between 500 and 10,000employees don’t know what DevOps is or are unsure if their compa‐nies practice it

In our view, the first step to “doing” DevOps is to understand thedisciplines that comprise a DevOps journey In this report, we aim

to enlighten media and entertainment executives about the compo‐nents of a DevOps transformation and to show the ways that adopt‐ing DevOps practices will enable their businesses to evolve withtheir industry’s ever-changing landscape We also aim to convincereaders who don’t already agree with us on this point: media andentertainment enterprises that don’t implement a DevOps approachwill inevitably fall far behind their industry’s leaders

New Media Was First in DevOps

It’s no surprise that the earliest example of DevOps in action camefrom a new media business that was challenged to house and servemassive banks of digital files

In 2009, Flickr stored more than 3 billion photos that its usersaccessed at a rate of 40,000 per second And that year its operationsmanager and a software engineer made history giving the firstknown public talk about the importance of bridging the dividebetween Development and Operations The evidence for their argu‐ment wowed the audience at O’Reilly’s Velocity 2009 conference:Flickr was deploying new features to its website 10 times a day.Back then, that rate of deployment was a big deal O’Reilly’s confer‐ence program noted:

Flickr takes the idea of “release early, release often” to an extreme—

on a normal day there are 10 full deployments of the site to our servers This session discusses why this rate of change works so well, and the culture and technology needed to make it possible.

In their presentation, “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Coopera‐tion at Flickr”, colleagues John Allspaw and Paul Hammond arguedthat communications and cooperation between the traditionallyadversarial development and operations teams was the key to their

1 “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr”

business’s ability to deploy new code, plan projects, and manage cri‐ses quickly and effectively

Allspaw and Hammond agreed at the time that only frequent, con‐tinual improvements could keep a business like theirs from beingovertaken by the likes of Facebook and Twitter But change wasn’tthe norm in their profession at the time In fact, many viewed everychange as a site outage risk The archetypal “ops person” wouldargue against frequent software changes in favor of site stability, soAllspaw and Hammond built tools and a culture of cooperationbetween their two departments that allowed change to happen asoften as possible DevOps and continuous delivery/continuousdeployment took the risk out of change by making it normal

“As web infrastructures grow,” they said, “the line between systemsand software become quite blurred Operations and developmentare disciplines that historically have been limited to a predictable list

of responsibilities and have suffered from a culture of pointiness.”1 To overcome that, they recommended simply that thehumans in development and the humans in operations try to learn

finger-to think more like each other

At the time, few traditional media and entertainment business lead‐ers would have thought their development and IT operations teamshad something to learn from a five-year-old new-media startup But,thanks to its DevOps approach, Flickr has scaled to store 13 billiondigital photos and videos, and process millions per day for its onlinecustomers, while the structure and function of traditional media andentertainment businesses have evolved to have much in commonwith them To be sure, even today, releases as frequent as what Flickrcited in 2009 are not the norm in most industries Few applicationdevelopment and IT operations managers claim to release applica‐tions more frequently than once per month But as the digital revo‐lution has forced all varieties of content providers to reinventthemselves as technology businesses, Flickr’s approach to keepingpace with consumer demand for device-agnostic online mediaaccess has become a model for media businesses—old and new

New Media Was First in DevOps | 3

2 “Making multi-cloud deployment a reality at Netflix with Spinnaker”

3 “Netflix’s Biggest Competition Is Sleep, Says CEO Reed Hastings”

4 “Artificial Intelligence Will Revolutionize the Media Business Here’s How.”

5 “Leveraging cloud-based predictive analytics to strengthen audience engagement”

6 “What a venture capitalist sees in the virtual and augmented reality market”

7 “Four digital trends reshaping the media industry”

8 “Living Services: The next Wave in the Digitization of Everything”

Digital Disruption in Media and Entertainment

It’s no secret that top DevOps performers are taking the lead in themedia and entertainment industry Netflix, which reported earlierthis year that its DevOps team facilitates 4,000 software deploymentsper day, now considers its biggest competition not another videostreaming platform or traditional broadcaster, but its customers’time asleep.2, 3

A scan of the job openings at publishers including The New YorkTimes, Dow Jones, and even 94-year-old book publisher W.W Nor‐ton reveal that DevOps engineers are also in demand in old media,where print has given way to electronic content and websites arecompeting with mobile apps for eyeballs Digital delivery has alsocompletely transformed the businesses of film and music producersand distributors Mobile technology has revolutionized gaming.And AI, machine learning, virtual and augmented reality, Internet

of Things, and Living Services are poised to transform them allagain.4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Meanwhile, accessible technologies have lowered barriers to entry inall areas of the industry, so that content and competition has explo‐ded, and innovative new entrants present serious threats to long-time leaders Every sector of the industry is shapeshifting: Printmedia looks more like broadcast media, video streaming platformsare venturing into film and television production, and social mediaplatforms have morphed into providers of news and video Theentire sector is melting into a single category of competitors

The media & entertainment businesses that are thriving are also building their infrastructures—namely, they’re applying the practi‐ces, methods, and cultural principles of DevOps to empower their

re-people, streamline their processes, and deliver best-in-class technol‐ogy rapidly and effectively.

What digital accessibility has made possible for customers of everyindustry rings particularly true for media and entertainment busi‐nesses: Consumers glued to their screens expect consistent and reli‐able experiences on whichever device they choose to use, wheneverthey choose to use it To stay vital, media and entertainment busi‐nesses must deliver digital products that consistently satisfy theircustomers’ expectations

A report this year on digital transformation in media and entertain‐ment from Accenture expresses the urgency:

To compete in this new ecosystem, new digital-based business strategies and associated capabilities are essential Broadcasters, tel‐ cos, and cable companies that hesitate now may spend years trying

to catch up.

The good news for media and entertainment companies is thatthey’re better positioned than those in many other industries to ben‐efit from the power of DevOps The tools, methods, and processes ofDevOps are ideal for building and operating platforms that delivercontent to viewers, readers, listeners, and players wherever they are,

on any device, at any time And it’s the proven best practice fororganizations tasked with distributing consumer-facing contentover the web

A cost–benefit analysis might not be enough to persuade decisionmakers in high-risk industries such as finance, healthcare, or medi‐cal device technologies to undertake a DevOps transformation Butfor media and entertainment organizations, DevOps is a no-brainer.Done right, it’s proven to reduce long-term costs and risk andimprove speed and nimbleness

To be sure, the most established enterprises will struggle the mostwith DevOps adoption A DevOps transformation is a massivechange-management undertaking Media and entertainment busi‐nesses must take radical steps to reorganize their teams, reinvent the

ways they protect their content through digital rights management,

ensure compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, andreboot their innovation process The more years a culture and itsprocesses have existed, the greater the challenge And an organiza‐tion embarking on a total overhaul is likely to be overwhelmed bythe choices in the crowded DevOps tools market

Digital Disruption in Media and Entertainment | 5

Still, some of these companies are bravely (or desperately) hurlingthemselves into the twenty-first century.

DevOps Defined: Six Key Competencies

DevOps is a practice, a methodology, and a culture centered onempowering IT teams to deliver and support more robust softwareservices more quickly Through new tools and the heavy use of auto‐mation, a DevOps organization brings cross-functional teamstogether to provide value faster than before Like an Agile organiza‐tion, a DevOps one also relies on incremental, iterative work pro‐cesses to gather and respond quickly to feedback

But, as our earlier Flickr example demonstrates, and as the parable

of Bill, the under-the-gun IT manager in the veritable DevOps bible,

The Phoenix Project (IT Revolution), shows, success is as muchabout human cooperation as it is about technology Doing DevOpsdemands that you change your culture, get people to work togethertoward common deliverables, and realign who’s in charge of what

We like to say, “show me your organizational chart and I’ll tell youhow big a problem you have.” The more conventional and hierarchi‐cal your chart, the bigger the problem Flattening every silo mightnot be a prerequisite to doing DevOps, but building skywaysbetween them is

We approach DevOps transformation as a holistic process thataddresses the People, the Process, and the Technology across six dis‐tinct competencies simultaneously We dive deeper into each ofthese in the sections that follow, and we share case studies thatdemonstrate each one, but here’s how we define the six competen‐cies necessary for a healthy DevOps practice:

Continuous integration (CI)

CI is the habit of regularly merging your code and validating theresults through unit tests to set your organization up for contin‐

uous delivery Result: Speedier software development.

Continuous delivery (CD)

CD is a method by which teams work in very short cycles to

automate code building and testing Result: Functional software

gets to where it’s needed, when it’s needed.

Dynamic cloud infrastructure

When CI and CD accelerate the organization’s velocity, adynamic, software-defined Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) willenable teams to create precisely configured environments on

demand Result: Shed the most traditional bottleneck of software

development while saving money.

Test automation

This competency is about creating a process to automate repeti‐tive and time-consuming formalized manual testing efforts,especially when CI/CD methods have accelerated developers’

output Result: Software operates as intended and teams are freed

up to discover issues in the code as it is being built.

Security automation

Also known as Development Security Operations (DevSecOps),

this competency infuses a security mindset into the execution of

a nimble and automated DevOps practice It automates securitytesting so that all known security concerns are being proactively

audited as part of the software delivery process Result: Simpli‐

fied security audits and peace of mind.

Monitoring

When CI and CD and IaaS combine to speed up your team’sactivity and spread it out over many servers, monitoring is theway to ensure that everything is being tracked and to measure

whether systems are operating as expected Result: Your soft‐

ware relays the most critical information about your operations to enable you to act on feedback and respond to problems quickly.

In a high-functioning DevOps organization, teams across testing,development, infrastructure, security, and support will all live andbreathe these six competencies Such a big-picture execution is noteasy—and it is vastly more complex than an Agile transformation

Advancing Beyond Agile

Speaking of Agile, as Agile consultants, we’re about to say somethingcontroversial Agile was oversold, but DevOps will deliver Sure,Agile has done a great job helping people organize their work, and

we believe in the benefits of being an Agile operation before youbecome a DevOps one In fact, we see going Agile as the gateway toyour DevOps transformation

Advancing Beyond Agile | 7

When it comes to the digital requirements of competing in mediaand entertainment, only through DevOps will you achieve true effi‐ciencies in terms of speed to market, scalability, and the ability toinnovate better and faster.

Here’s why we say that By adopting Agile practices, many organiza‐tions improved on speed and agility in planning their applicationdevelopment process But Agile doesn’t speak to the technical toolsand processes that systems administrators, quality assurance, andengineering departments follow, technical execution became a bot‐tleneck Changing how those teams work to fit the Agile approachdemands a major DevOps undertaking

For instance, when one organization we worked with began working

in two-week sprints, their project management teams were sailing.But making changes to the software applications they managedrequired coordinating between the software and operations team,which could take months Even though the software teams weremoving fast, the company wasn’t

It’s little wonder that Agile practices and the move to the cloud are

the top factors driving interest in DevOps Just as an Agile approachbreaks up large tasks into iterative steps, DevOps organizes teamsand system architectures into smaller ones It replaces the ploddingpace of building monolithic applications with microservices-basedapplication architecture Instead of putting an entire application onone server, for example, DevOps excels when apps are broken intosmaller, focused segments that reside on separate servers that cancommunicate with one another And, it introduces automation toenable deployment daily instead of quarterly

These DevOps best practices have been shown to reduce errors, fric‐tion, and frustration and speed up delivery when businesses auto‐mate environment management and deployments and integratecontinuously And layering DevOps over Agile is proven to improvenew business growth and operational efficiency

Benefits and Limits of DevOps

The advantages of DevOps done right go far beyond accelerating thebenefits of Agile, of course The many and various results businessesattribute to the practice make clear what media and entertainmentorganizations stand to gain from undergoing a DevOps transforma‐

9 “DevSecOps Transformation: The New DNA of Agile Business”

tion We call the benefits “itys”—velocity, stability, and agility, whichall contribute to profitability

In fact, high-performing DevOps-enabled organizations havereported deploying 200 times more often, spending 22 percent less

on unplanned work, recovering from deployment failures 24 timesfaster, spending 29 percent more time on new work, and failing one-third as often.9

How? DevOps empowers small teams to test and deploy their owncode to the customer; it saves teams from waiting in line for testing

or to coordinate with other teams or get on the release schedule; and

it better enables teams to respond to customer insights

But not all businesses that claim to be doing DevOps are high per‐formers or really “doing DevOps” in a legitimate way Because it’snot as clear cut as Agile, DevOps can create confusion for organiza‐tions that don’t understand its nuances Many companies takingtheir first steps toward a DevOps transformation struggle with how

to get started, budgeting for the change, finding and integrating theright tools, security concerns, a lack of expertise, inflexible projectmanagement processes, resistant employees, and a lack of supportfrom top management Even for teams that easily overcome thosehurdles, the DevOps journey is likely to be a long one

The software company Atlassian developed a model to measure theDevOps maturity of respondents to a survey who said they weredoing DevOps at some level Based on their answers, Atlassianranked more than half at the “beginner” or “intermediate” level; 15percent ranked at the “basic” level—less mature than beginners Inthe same study, Atlassian discovered that companies consider ach‐ieving the DevOps cultural mindset—sharing tools and knowledgebetween the development and operations teams—to be the easypart Implementing CD, automated testing, and monitoring is diffi‐cult, they believe

In our practical experience, however, the biggest challenge is gettingformerly independent departments to collaborate with one another

And even there, many businesses that say they have a DevOps cul‐

ture are only part way there, for instance, only sharing information

Benefits and Limits of DevOps | 9

when it’s asked for instead of in a consistently open format That’snot very DevOpsy.

One challenge to doing DevOps specific to the media and entertain‐ment industry is constant change in the organizational chart Morethan half of media and entertainment industry executives whoresponded to a recent survey said they expect to pursue acquisitions

in the next 12 months to advance their digital innovation capabili‐ties Change in leadership can be another obstacle on the path of aDevOps journey if an executive team that bought in to its value andunderstood the commitment is replaced by one that doesn’t

Let’s talk now about those six competencies we consider crucial toany DevOps practice:

When it comes to delivering product or fixing problems, speed wins

in the competitive and fast-paced media and entertainment busi‐ness Keeping a pace is what CI and CD are about

At the heart of CI and CD are the following questions:

• Why accumulate developed code while waiting to release it once

a quarter if you can release it in small pieces every day?

• And, after code is released, why not put it into use?

For many companies, this is a radical idea

The CI/CD approach has three clear benefits:

• It allows the organization to isolate and correct problems faster

• It saves developers from waiting for manual processes to getworking code into needed environments as quickly as possible

10 “2016 State of DevOps Report Key Findings”

• It provides the control framework for using automated testing

to ensure software is working as expected and ready to go at anytime

In practicing CI, a developer tackles small pieces of code and mergeschanges or new features with other developers’ code regularly—whether it’s a few times a week, at a regular time each day, or evenautomatically every time the code is committed to a shared reposi‐tory The practice minimizes complicated merges, exposes integra‐tion issues, and sets the organization up for CD

CD is the practice of working in short cycles (“sprints” in speak) to automate the rebuilding of the code set as well as testing,packaging, and placing code on a server (CD is a similar conceptthat speaks more specifically to automating the deployment of thecode to production environments.)

Agile-This iterative process allows QA teams to isolate problems earlier,developers to make fixes more quickly, and functioning software to

be shipped to needed environments at any time Instead of checkingfor problems at the end of a process, CD ensures quality at eachstage By leaning on CI to deliver code changes more often, thisdownstream automation speeds up development and gives develop‐ers the feedback loop they need to make improvements When, forinstance, a code change creates a bug, referring to the recent itera‐tive tests lets you quickly locate the source of the problem

Developers at organizations that do CI/CD well reportedly spendless time on unplanned work, more time on new features or code,and less time correcting errors.10

Businesses new to the idea of CI/CD often need to scale some diffi‐cult hurdles: Choosing from among the CI-enabling tools that areavailable is one step, modifying them to fit your needs is another,and releasing code every day is a big psychological stretch for devel‐opers and operators After they make the leap, however, and theirteams become nimble enough through CI/CD to accelerate develop‐ment, the next hurdle will pop up: The servers and infrastructurethey release to will need to be nimble and automatically configured,too

CI/CD | 11