In the fast pace world of agile software delivery there is a fine balance between architecture, security and engineers in how they work together and more often then not they seem to step on each others toes. Each of this groups have the same goal to deliver software but the path to that gaol changes for each of the groups, so how can the three groups work in an agile way to deliver software at speed using a DevOps mindset.

Architects looks at the big picture and how it all fits together, security look at how to secure it to make it safe and the engineer just wants to write code and deploy it, simple isn’t but in the world of agile these boundaries have been blurred.  

Traditionally with a water fall approach you would plan out your architecture and security controls then pass it onto the engineer which would then pass it on to security for vulnerability testing. This was the world we use to know but enter agile and that broke the defined boundaries between the groups.     

I look to explore how working in an Agile manner has blurred the boundaries in terms of responsibilities between the three groups and how to enabler a better collaborative experience between them.

Platforms as a concept have been around for a long time, probably since the dawn of the PC,  and folks have being building layers of abstractions to simplify complicated process, laborious grunt work or  even just day-to-day mundane repetitive work. The key focus always was to simplify the end user's experience and provide a simple and easy way to do what ever it is they need to do without having a complicated process to follow or just a command line prompt.

This is a story of my journey on how and why we implemented windows containers and what we could have done differently if given the chance of a redo. 

We had a vision… a self service platform where developers can just code and push there code to the platform without having to worry about stuff like governance, security, scaling, change management and observability. What did this vision include you ask, well of course all and any workloads. As engineers we all know that anything is possible give enough money and time, so we made the decision to push forward and start building a platform to support windows containers.

What happened next and how could we have made better decisions? That is what I want to explore and try and communicate to the audience so they can avoid same pitfalls. 

I will still have technical aspects to talk about but will be more focused on the journey of how we got here and the decisions that where made on the way.