#evolverocks

TAKING YOUR AEM IMPLEMENTATION TO

ROCKSTAR LEVEL ! ! ! ! ! !

CAT REUSSWIG

August 31, 2016

#evolverocks

• Culture

• Mvp

• Agile teams

• Automation

• devops

TOPICS I ’LL COVER

HAVE NO FEAR: ITERATE EVERYTHING

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A way of thinking, behaving or working

that exists in an organization

CULTURE IS KEY

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ITERATE EVERYTHING, FEAR NOTHING!

TRY STUFF!

• Hypothetical: lets just say you are asked to start a major project

initiative where they would like multiple sites migrated to AEM in

parallel and quickly…..

• What do you do?

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MVP – Minimal Viable Product, the smallest useful set of

capabilities that will meet the business need in production

MVP AND RELEASE PLANNING

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Abstraction:

Story review components ensures multi-use lego approach

Story Mappings aids in MVP creation

CSS Strategy shared plus specific

ABSTRACTION LEADS TO FREEDOMDOESN’T HURT OPTIMIZATION EITHER

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Bigger projects vs smaller projects

Mature team including solid Product Owners

New team, learning curve/ramp up requirements

Pairing!

Time zones & communications

SCRUM VS KANBANCHOICES CHOICES

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Obvious answer: when communication goes to *$@#;

When standups take more than 15 minutes

BUT (behold the underlying truth!)

Sometimes you need to try something to bring along more people to the agile way

• New to agile, new to AEM, new to processes

• Pair people so they function as one – only one speaks at Standup

• Make each team as cross functional and complete as possible – include UX,

PO, QA, Analytics, Devs, SM

SCRUM TEAM SIZINGHOW BIG IS TOO BIG?

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If the process is nailed AUTOMATE IT! (why not?)

• Releases

• Deploys

• Testing

• Go/NoGo

• Trouble-shooting

AUTOMATION FOCUSFREE THE HUMANS – MAKE THE MACHINES DO IT!

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SHARED PAIN IS A GREAT MOTIVATOR:

UAT Handoff

• Provide UAT Wikis

• Review Wikis (UAT Team)

Beta Release

• Cut Code and Create Release Candidate

• Deploy to Beta (Test) Environment

• Mark tickets for handoff

PRODUCTION SUPPORT

• Handle issues incoming from production

DOTS: delivery of the sprint duties with sprint cycle rotation

40%

60%

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Focus one team on DOTS and live the pain

HOW TO MAKE DOTS LESS SCARYNOTHING TO FEAR BUT FEAR ITSELF (OR JUST ELIMINATE THAT NASTY

FEAR STUFF)

Ooohh

Noooo

I’m on

DOTS!

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• Github Webhook to kick off build (Jenkins)

• Build includes Unit/Integration/Functional Tests

• Karma Tests

• Deploy to CI

• Validation Scripts -> Check bundle status and that right ones are there

• SmokeTest (author and publish are different) ensure app is up and running properly

CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION UPLIFT

First Stop: CI/CD

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• Content Syncs from Prod to Test Envs (Prod -> DW -> TestEnv) (remember Grabbit?)

https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-2/administer/content/assets/best-practices-for-

assets/assets-migration-guide.html

• Release Cut (merge master into Release branch)

• Update Jira Tickets with ToProd Info (tagging tickets that will be deployed in next

release)

• Update UAT Handoff Wikis -> Letting business and UAT teams know which tickets are

ready for UAT and their status

• Deploy latest release to Betas for testing.

RELEASE PROCESS AUTOMATION

THINGS WE USED TO DO MANUALLY THAT ARE NOW CRON JOBS

Second Stop: Build & Release

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Utility Jobs - actions that used to be 100% manual now able to be triggered by

Jenkins Job:

• Server Restarts

• Server Clean UP (Remove Zombie Bundles)

• Clear Dispatcher Cache

• Clear JSP Cache

• Cherry-Pick (needed commits onto next release branch)

• Build and Deploy Random Branch Jobs

Our success: we extrapolated this entire process for our analytics code stream; mirroring

the entire automated process for this additional code stream. Puppet makes it all work

locally!

RELEASE PROCESS - ROCKSTAR

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How to find out before the business team that something is wrong in PROD???

Spiked a story on identifying key transactions/metrics

Spiked a story to learn with the experts on how to use our tool: AppD

Focused on Instrumenting Business Transactions

First Focus: FOLLOW THE $$$$$$$ -- do CHECKOUT END TO END!

Collaborative team approach

Tried all of it out in the BETA environment – Learned the hard way that we could

impact production with our instrumentation so testing it is a good thing!

NOW FOR THE HEAVY L IFTING: TROUBLE-SHOOTING AUTOMATION

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• Instrumentation For Checkout

- Metrics on Avg Load, Response time, #Errors for every page in the flow

- Counts on Splash Page Errors (specific reasons the flow fails or crashes)

- Counts on flow entry and completion (rough look at close rate)

• Instrumentation For Business Class

- Metrics on Avg Load, Response time, # Errors on Home page vs other pages

- Monitoring on Geolocation service

- Number of times served up from "FingerPrint" (on network) availablityh

- Number of times served up from fallback

UPLIFT IN METRICS FOR THE DEV TEAM:

ITS NOT JUST ABOUT ANALYTICS FOR THE BUSINESS

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Graphing the Metrics

- Trending information on Error counts (Error/min VS Exception/min)

- Dashboarding for DOTS (support) team

- Traffic to nodes and datacenters

- Response times, errors, load

VISUALS

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FAST FEEDBACK LOOPS

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Current Alerts

- Average response times get too high

- End User Monitoring times get too high

- Disk space gets too low

- Error rate gets too high

Axioms

- Only send alerts containing actionable steps

to solve the issue!

- Notices only go to people who can fix

the problem

NOTIFICATIONS

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FUTURE DREAMS

Can actually be configured to trigger Jenkins jobs (like restarts)

A great example would be when Disk space gets too low (due to AEM needing

compaction)- AppD could alert and in the alert trigger a job that:

1. Emails support teams

2. Takes specific node out of node balancer

3. Performs compaction (including restarts)

4. Validates node

5. Puts back in load balancer

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DEVOPS: THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOMITS HARD WORK, BUT WELL WORTH THE EFFORT!

• For the 6.1 upgrade, we tackled improving our delivery & tooling with

the migration to the cloud

• We wanted elasticity, consistency that had eluded us in our VM env

• VAGRANT image made it so ALL DEVS matched PROD! QUALITY

• Configuring any new environment, be it author, pub can be done

almost instantly with our “infrastructure as code”

• Fully redundant across data centers, GSLB

• =#FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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TOOLS USED TO HELP AUTOMATE THE

AGILE DEV/TEST/DELIVERY CYCLE

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https://github.com/TWCable/grabbit

Timewarnercable.com

Business.timewarnercable.com

Check it out:

#evolverocks

THANK YOU!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/catreusswig