As agile practitioners, we’ve learned to love highly cohesive, cross-functional on-site teams. These teams, much like monolithic applications; succeed due to the proximity of useful knowledge. Distributed, asynchronous teams must rely on different strategies and tactics in order to be effective while still adhering to the principles laid out in the Agile manifesto. 

This talk is an experience report from working for the past two years on a variety of distributed, synchronous and asynchronous agile software delivery teams.

Roll Your Own Platform as a Service (PaaS) with Docker

You're convinced you need to run your own platform as a service (PaaS) . You’ve told your company that in order to save cash and comply with regulations for your sector (HIPAA etc), deploying a virtual, private platform on infrastructure you control is the way to go.

This workshop prepares us to build our own PaaS from scratch and deploy loosely-coupled applications with Docker.  We will learn how to:

• Assemble a PaaS from the ground up
• Create golden images for running Docker containers.
• Package up a complex application(s) into a Docker image
• Release the Docker image
• Deploy Docker containers to multiple hosts with Ansible
• Run and monitor Docker containers with Systemd
• Use Consul for service discovery, configuration and health monitoring

We’ve all been there. We’ve had this lovely, monolithic application purring happily away on some platform-as-a-service. However, the application and team are growing and we need to separate out functionality into independent services to keep moving forward without stepping on one anothers’ toes.

This talk deconstructs the “perceived simplicity” of platform-as-a-services and answers some critical questions:

• What are the essential components of a Platform as a Service?
• When is building our own PaaS worthwhile?
• How and where should we leverage docker in the provision/build/release/deploy/un-provision application life-cycle?

This talk stems from a 6 month engagement building a platform as a service for a micro-service based architecture.