Value Matrix ~ Questions to Ask Flashcards
Less frequent deployment
- What is your biggest bottleneck for deploying faster?
2. Are you doing any progressing delivery today? Canary / Blue Green ?
Inconsistent implementation of the deployment process / pipelines
- What does it look like to add a new microservice to your deployment automation?
- Do you reuse code? (configuration / pipelines)
- Can the developer self-service (make the changes on their own)?
- What goes into troubleshooting issues with adding new applications?
- Does that require a CD SME?
Long time to recover from a failure
- How do you recover from a failure today?
- How often does that happen?
- How much time does it take you to understand the root cause?
- What is stopping you from recovering faster?
- Do you have a way to measure the time to recover?
- Are you using multiple systems to get to the bottom of what was the issue / what changed (infra / app / config / etc.) ?
Inconsistent deployments on all levels (code / config / infra) - no one stop shop for changes*
- How do you track changes to your environments (changes are code changes, configuration changes, infra changes etc…)
Be very specific here with what is a change (that it is not just a code change but way more than that)
Failed promtion (Dev -> QA -> Staging -> Production) process due to missing configurations
(there were changes in staging that were not promoted to prod because there is no single source of truth fo all changes)
- Did it happen that during a promotion to production everything worked in staging but did not work in production? (or in any other promortion process dev to qa / etc.)
- How do you promote from environment X to environment Y today?
- Why did it happen?
- How long did it take you to find out about the change that was made to staging that affected production?
Maintaining multiple pipelines (due to pipeline sprawl)
- How many pipelines do you have? why?
- Is it challenging to maintain all those pipelines? How much time you spend on it?
- Do you experience deviations between teams on how they build / execute their deployment pipelines?
- Is it challenging to make changes to those pipelines?
- Are you able to introduce new features and capabilities to the pipelines like canary, verifications, testing, etc. ?
No live status of deployments / applications
- How do you confirm the deployment’s configuration?
- How do you troubleshoot issues with the deployment on Kubernetes?
- Do you have a way to confirm an application is at the correct version?
- Do you know what the correct/desired version of an Application is outside of reviewing the most recent pipeline?
- Is it easy to access the most recent pipeline details for every application to review the expected version?
Limited Protection from Introduction of Non Approved/Reviewed Changes
- Can you ensure all changes have gone through the appropriate change management process and been reviewed?
- Do you track changes to the app config as well?
No live feedback / status of pipeline execution
- How do you know that the application is configured correctly and no configuration changes were introduced between deployments?
Developers has access to the k8s cluster in order to do their daily job (see what is where)
- What do you have in place for Kubernetes RBAC to reduce access to cluster?
- How difficult it is for you to maintain your security on your k8s clusters?
- How often do users need to go into Kubernetes to debug your application?
Developers has access to the k8s cluster in order to do their daily job (see what is where)
- What do you have in place for Kubernetes RBAC to reduce access to cluster?
- How difficult it is for you to maintain your security on your k8s clusters?
- How often do users need to go into Kubernetes to debug your application?
Different Development Practices - Inconsistent Developer experience between app development to app deployment (which includes configuration / infra)
- Do developers can understand the deployment process ?
- Can developers debug the deployment process ?
- Is onboarding a SW developer on the deployment process challenging?
Pipeline SME Required
- Pipelines for deployments often require a SME familiar with the automation systems, the application configurations and Kubernetes.
- This person is normally very expensive and also a bottle neck for many organizations.
Developers have varying degrees of internal processes and k8s knowledge
- How long does it take for a new hire to deploy in prod for the first time? 2. How do you go about abstracting as much “k8s/process” away from the developers?
