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**Dave Farley:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So you're telling us some very good stories, Dave, about your time at LMAX that you were very fond of, some great people that you've worked with, that you've been in contact ever since... And you were part of that family, in a way, right? Your work family maybe, your continuous delivery family, whatev... |
I would like to dig a little bit deeper into the specific stack/technology that you used at the time, and also how that changed over time. |
In the early 2000's, what did a technology stack look like? The programming language, the framework, the CI/CD, how did you organize work... That type of thing. |
**Dave Farley:** I'm more than happy to talk about tools and technology. I should begin though by caveating it, because I'm not very technology-driven, which is weird for a technologist to say... But I think that the tools are secondary, I think that I value design and design thinking more than I value the tools, and I... |
Having said that -- so my background was largely in the C family of languages. I did a lot of programming in C in the early days, C++ later on... During the early 2000's, building the points of scale systems and stuff like that, I was doing a lot of work in Java, sometimes C\#, bits of other things... Python... I playe... |
So people have been doing continuous integration for a long time, and I was doing some version of that in the early '90s, but we had continuous build... But it was all just done in shell scripts. Tools to manage a build process and those sorts of things didn't come along until about 2000, and the first one was I think ... |
When we built the exchange LMAX, we started off using Java and CruiseControl, the starting point for building our deployment pipeline. And we built a very sophisticated deployment pipeline with different instances of that, using mostly things like Ant files as the glue between stages, and those sorts of things, to enco... |
We did a lot of development of sometimes reasonably sophisticated tooling of our own. We built our own deployment mechanism, which was similar in some ways to something like Chef or Puppet. It ran a little agent on the server, and the server called back to some master repository, and it pulled down changes and deployed... |
We were doing early things with infrastructure as code. I remember we wanted to be able to version control the configuration of network switches, and the only way that you could configure the network switches was through a firmware admin console, web-based firmware, like you get in a home router, or something like that... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[28:11\] Yeah, that's right. |
**Dave Farley:** It would then drive the web app to poke the values into the router. So we were doing a lot of messing around with those sorts of things; very ad-hoc, very -- incrementing those as we needed... And as I said, we did some fairly cool, fairly sophisticated things. |
One of the things that one of my colleagues, Mark Pryce, wrote at LMAX was still the best version I've seen ever of a test distributor. So we were managing a fairly large set of infrastructure to be able to get our feedback fast enough. We had one big repo; we'd put everything in one big repo, and then we could build a... |
So we did that, and that was efficient. We ended up with a network - when I left, it was about 48 different server instances that ran our continuous delivery infrastructure, and a dynamically managed compute grid to evaluate these things, which Mark Pryce wrote the software called Romero to be able to manage all of the... |
In that project in particular we weren't very big consumers of other people's software, to some degree. We wrote a lot of stuff of our own, partly because of the performance demands, most of the third-party software that we had wasn't fast enough for what we were trying to do with our exchange, so we wrote our own coll... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. |
**Dave Farley:** ...a HashMap in Java, for each entry, at a time, creates five objects. So you've got five garbage collection problems for every item that you added to a HashMap in those days. So we wrote constant memory footprint HashMaps and stuff like this so we can go fast. So we did a lot of stuff at different lev... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's really fascinating to capture the context in which these ideas came to be... Because while different people may have had similar thoughts, first of all, ThoughtWorks was a consultancy at the time, I imagine... |
**Dave Farley:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** ...so that's how it started; that's what I know about ThoughtWorks. So not only you had to come up with these ideas, but you also had to build the tools, which didn't exist... Open source I think was only just getting started... This was like early 2000's, so it wasn't really a thing. Git was only jus... |
So that must have been very challenging. And even so, you built those things, you shipped those ideas, you shipped the code, and many people benefitting so many ways, decades after you started. 21 years later we're talking about how this started and how relevant it is, and it feels to me like the whole world, in a way ... |
**Dave Farley:** \[31:56\] There's a bit more history than that. So there were people doing good stuff before us, and open source had been around as an idea. It wasn't as big as it is now, there wasn't as much choice as there is now, but you know, Linux was around... Linus Torvalds had released that as an open source p... |
ThoughtWorks was an interesting place. There was a brief spell -- I feel privileged to have worked for ThoughtWorks at a time that was very exciting. And ThoughtWorks in London in particular I think was not quite on the same scale perhaps, but it was almost like an agile Xerox PARC; it was a place where some interestin... |
As I said earlier, Agile at a big scale, Agile in a more commercial setting - we were doing it because we thought we could make software more quickly and better quality software using these techniques, so it would have a commercial advantage implied. These were the reasons why we were doing some of these things. |
BDD, continuous delivery, mocking - these are ideas that came out of that office in ThoughtWorks. Several books that are famous, Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests, my Continuous Delivery book... There were people that are now well-known in the industry that we were all part of that group of people worki... |
The software industry had been through what I think of as a fairly rough time of trying to industrialize it through the late '80s and '90s, applying techniques that people thought would work to make it more effective and productive, and they didn't. And the Agile movement was a bit of a reaction against that, I think. |
What I'm trying to say is that we were building on the shoulders of giants. People that did stuff before. Continuous delivery I think of as second-generation extreme programming. It's extreme programming, but just with some other ideas added to it, that help you get there a bit more easily maybe, in some ways. But if y... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I see a lot of the new systems, for example Argo CD - that's something which fascinates me right now, how it takes the concept of a pipeline to like a new level, and you have workflows, you have a programmable API, which is the Kubernetes, and this control plane where you define these custom resources... |
**Dave Farley:** We switched to Jenkins at LMAX; we refactored our pipeline to use Jenkins later on. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Interesting. So there was this transition. And now we're in the era -- I think it's almost like the third one, which is a cloud-native one, where we have so many projects. I'm not sure whether you looked recently at the CNCF landscape, where you have all those projects. There's so much things there, a... |
**Dave Farley:** Both. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So I'm wondering, how did the cloud-native landscape shape your ideas of continuous delivery? Was there an impact of that, or was that happening in parallel? What influence, if any, do you feel coming from there? |
**Dave Farley:** \[35:45\] I think that the gestation of the cloud was kind of in parallel with the starting points of continuous delivery. We published our book in 2010, and that kind of put a name on these practices, I suppose. And people these days talk about continuous delivery and continuous integration and all th... |
I think that the cloud makes some of the continuous delivery thinking more obvious. I mean, you'd be absolutely insane to be an organization like Amazon or Google and to manually configure your servers. It's such a bizarre idea; it's just laughable. You couldn't do that. You're gonna automate that, unless you are crazy... |
So ideas like infrastructure as code just seem obvious in the cloud. And they didn't always seem obvious to other people. People thought we were strange when we started automating those things, and making our servers in our data centers more repeatable and reliable. There's that kind of stuff. |
If I'm honest, I don't think that cloud had a huge impact on the kinds of projects that I was working on during that time. Certainly, up until after the continuous delivery book came out. Of course, like everybody else, it has an impact on me now in the way that I think about these things and the way that I advise my c... |
I am, I suppose, an old school developer. My formative years in software development probably predated the cloud... The cloud is obviously a good thing; it gives us lots of opportunities. It commoditizes compute, but to my mind, it's not a fundamentally defining thing. It certainly changes some of the dimensions of des... |
One of the things that seems to me that changes is the economics of the design from an architectural point of view. In the old days, when we were doing stuff in our own data centers, we were probably more worried about managing storage, because storage was expensive. And that's largely become commoditized. And the pric... |
One of the things... We were talking about the continuous integration and continuous delivery tooling - I don't think we're there yet. I think there's more to do. I would like to see tooling that's more opinionated. I would like to see tooling that just -- bang, gave me a deployment pipeline. If I follow the rules, it'... |
\[39:45\] One of my favorite technologies - we were talking about tech earlier on - is Gradle for build systems in the Java space. And one of the things that I always loved about Gradle is that if you don't care, if you just are willing to buy into its model, you can write your build script in one line. You can just sa... |
I like opinionated software. I like opinionated software that says "Do it like this", and if you don't like it like that, it'll get it out of your way really quickly. I'd like to see more tools like that, because I think there's a tragedy of the commons kind of thing goes on a little bit. If everybody has a choice, eve... |
So I am currently in the middle for a piece of work that I'm working on to demonstrate how to build deployment pipelines, building a little sample application using GitHub Actions. It's alright. It's nice. I quite like GitHub Actions, it's okay. But it's too fiddly. I'm fighting with it, trying to get my Docker images ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's really interesting, because I have seen -- so these trends have been emerging in... I think build packs came closest to that, where it would automatically detect your application and it would know what to do; what is the build step, what is the run step, what is the package step... So it had th... |
There's even like a control plane which controls all the Kubernetes deployments, all that DNS, your CDN, all the things. So I think that is fascinating. Could we have something similar for CI/CD, this concept of a pipeline? I think we should. But I don't think there's any one clear winner as to how to approach it. It's... |
Serverless - you can have an infinite capacity that you run for milliseconds, and then it spins down again. And that's a very interesting take. But you're right, how do you declare the pipeline or the thing that kind of controls all of these things that need to happen, because shipping the code out there, just part of ... |
**Dave Farley:** \[44:11\] There is. But if I'm honest, part of why I'm complaining and being a grumpy old man about this is I'd like people to take my opinion. \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right, okay. Same does everyone else. |
**Dave Farley:** Yeah, of course. \[laughs\] But one of the things that I wish people had picked up from the continuous delivery book that they didn't was that the book outlines a pattern for what a deployment pipeline is. Jez and I each wrote equal amounts of that book. I started off writing the beginnings of the pipe... |
So you could imagine -- so my minimum deployment pipeline is pretty fixed. You start off with a commit stage, we give you fast feedback, it'll search your coding standards, runs all of your unit tests... If it succeeds, it builds a release candidate. That release candidate is a deployable thing. You deploy it into an a... |
That's my minimum deployment pipeline. I would pay my own money to be able to have that at the push of a button for a Java project or a Python project, or a C\# project, or whatever it was I was doing... And I can see no reason -- in fact, I have built that internally in organizations in the past. I must confess, when ... |
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