Towards self-serve infrastructure
Thoughtworks Technology Podcast
Thoughtworks
4.5 • 58 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2020
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Traditional, centralized approaches to infrastructure management risk creating organizational friction and bottlenecks for dev teams. By defining a standardized tech stack, you immediately make it harder to satisfy your teams’ diverse needs.
A self-serve approach can enable teams to tailor infrastructure to their particular needs. But how can you deliver a self-serve infrastructure without paving the way for chaos and ensure the appropriate guardrails are in place? In this episode, our regular co-hosts Neal Ford and Mike Mason are joined by Evan Bottcher, Head of Technology, ThoughtWorks Australia and Zhamak Dehghani, Technology Principal, ThoughtWorks North America, to explore how to benefit from self-service options.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, everyone to the ThoughtWorks Technology Podcast. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm one of your regular host, Neil Ford. |
| 0:16.0 | And I'm Mike Mason, also one of your regular hosts. |
| 0:18.0 | And we're joined today by two of our colleagues on the Doppler |
| 0:22.4 | group within ThoughtWorks, which is the group that puts together the technology radar. |
| 0:27.5 | I'm Evan Botcher. I'm from Melbourne Australia and I'm a principal consultant. |
| 0:31.6 | I'm Jermak Dherne and I'm from San Francisco office and I'm a tech principal here. And Jamak is normally one of our |
| 0:39.6 | hosts, but today she's a guest so that she gets to talk more because she has strong opinions |
| 0:44.3 | about this. So one of the things that frequently comes up when we meet face to face to put |
| 0:49.2 | together the technology radar are a lot of very interesting conversations that get spawned by what we call blips on our |
| 0:56.4 | radar. And this podcast is a good example of a very interesting conversation that spun up, |
| 1:02.2 | and we wanted to capture some of the essence of it as a podcast. |
| 1:07.0 | Yeah, so the specific discussion that we had in the meeting was around using pull requests |
| 1:13.3 | somehow to cause infrastructure changes to happen rather than using a ticketing system. |
| 1:19.4 | But that's not where we're going to start. |
| 1:21.8 | This kind of spawned a whole discussion about what we mean by self-serve infrastructure because I think it's a |
| 1:30.5 | kind of a pillar of platform strategy that we talk about at ThoughtWorks. We talk about |
| 1:36.7 | reducing friction for teams. We talk about self-serve infrastructure, but we wanted to kind of dive |
| 1:41.8 | in in a podcast into what we mean by that, why that's important. |
| 1:47.8 | So maybe you guys could start with talking about some of the kind of the traditional challenges |
| 1:52.4 | that teams face and how self-serve infrastructure, whatever that is, might help. |
| 1:59.6 | Sure. So I think traditionally operations or infrastructure management has been under often the control |
... |
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