Workshops

In the past I’ve delivered the 1-day workshops listed on this page at various conferences. In addition to my industry work, I also teach a class on lean/agile product management at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. You can find my class materials here.

Foundations of DevOps and Continuous Delivery

This workshop is aimed at a general audience: developers, testers, systems administrators, and managers. Up to 100 people can participate. There is no coding involved. It is an in-person version of my video training.

Overview: Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. The practice of continuous delivery sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, low-risk delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and IT operations, teams can get changes released in a matter of hours—sometimes even minutes—no matter what the size of the product or the complexity of the enterprise environment.

Description: Jez Humble presents an in-depth guide to the principles and practices behind continuous delivery and the DevOps movement, along with case studies from real companies and ideas to help you adopt continuous delivery and DevOps within your organization. You’ll start by learning the value proposition and the foundations that enable continuous delivery, followed by an introduction to the pattern at the heart of continuous delivery–the deployment pipeline. The training then dives into the key development practices of continuous integration and comprehensive test automation. These lessons cover change management, agile infrastructure management, managing databases, architecture, and the patterns that enable low-risk releases. They conclude by discussing the culture and organizational change patterns of high performing companies. After taking this training, you will understand not just the principles and practices that enable continuous delivery and devops, but also how they are implemented in high performing organizations. With this knowledge you’ll be ready to transform your organization’s software delivery capability to get high quality solutions to market fast, while reducing the risk of the release process.

High Performance Product Development

This workshop can accommodate up to 30 participants. This workshop is derived from a graduate-level class on lean/agile product management that I teach at UC Berkeley (class material is licensed Creative Commons).

Overview: Large organizations often struggle to leverage software to create innovative products. A number of organizational factors conspire to create obstacles to moving fast at scale, including culture, governance, and financial management, and the application of portfolio and program management strategies that do not take advantage of the unique characteristics of software.

Description: The first half of the day sees the group divided into teams, each of which will build a product in three hours. In the afternoon, we build on the lessons from the morning by discussing how to take a lean/agile approach to developing new products and running large scale programs of work, and how to grow a culture that enables organizations to turn software into a competitive advantage.

Audience:

  • Executives interested in strategy, leadership, organization culture, and good governance
  • Directors of IT, both for applications and for infrastructure and operations
  • Anyone working in program or project management, including members of the PMO
  • People in finance and accounting or in governance, regulation, and compliance who are involved in delivery

Deploying Cloud Native Systems with Terraform and AWS

This is a hands-on-keyboards workshop for a technical audience, which accommodates up to 20 people. The class material is in the public domain.

In the class, participants will learn:

  • AWS guest network architecture: regions, availability zones, VPCs, subnets, security groups, routes, gateways.
  • Some elements of AWS identity and access management: roles, policies.
  • How to configure a simple, highly available AWS application environment with AWS autoscaling groups, load balancers, RDS, and CloudWatch.
  • Infrastructure-as-Code with AWS and Terraform: How to configure and manage AWS infrastructure using Terraform.
  • Very simple automated deployment using shell scripts and an S3 bucket.
  • An introduction to architecture for distributed systems.

Prerequisites:

  • Participants must bring a laptop with support for bash. Linux, MacOS, or Windows 10 with Windows Subsystem for Linux installed are all fine. Alternatively, you can stand up a virtual linux box using a tool such as VirtualBox.
  • Participants must be comfortable using the Bash shell / command-line and a text editor.
  • Please install the AWS CLI and Terraform BEFORE coming to class.