Ticketmaster Cloud DevOps Drivers License Open Sourced Today!

This is a great day for me to share what the Ticketmaster Tech team has been doing for many months now. Tech Maturity or as I like to call it, the cloud drivers license. With all the attention on software eating the world and enterprises looking to transform or go all in on public cloud or become agile and even switch application engineering concepts. There was a missing piece of guidance and communication from Sr guru developer of cloud native apps who never saw anything besides a script driven deployment, to the Sr guru developer of VAX on windows emulators who has never logged into a public cloud api. What would they communicate to each other to be better together? What would they communicate to a mid level or junior programmer to learn and clearly articulate what they should be doing next to progress up through the ranks at their own pace? Check it out on github

With the CTO and CIO granting the product owners the ability to make their own decisions on what to run, how many, how much to spend, how many regions, and what growth plan to spend a large portion of the IT budget in the cloud, shouldn't your tech leadership be requiring the same tech maturity and team maturity in your enterprise? Check it out and leave feedback.

Technical Debt: That code and infrastructure stuff that propped up the G2000 and the World economy for the last 40 years or at least serviced massive ticket onsales, billions in e-commerce, and millions of moments of joy for fans at Ticketmaster for last 30+ years. When you decide to focus on developer centric goals or application centric or even fan centric ideals as a technology software company, the ability to deliver on features faster everywhere leaves a lot to be desired if you have the same technology deployment plan from 1990. Competition has a way of forcing the hand to manage and make haste of the technical debt. The quantification of agility is felt when you see it in motion, either by a competitor or by one of your product teams having the aha moment and shedding 30 years of development process muscle memory for the new way.

Tech Maturity (Video Intro 3 min) is the communication portal to track and communicate what tasks and instructions are software engineers to utilize when building a high value webscale service that is competitive, relevant, scalable, high quality experience, yet is performant, resilient, and economically savvy to produce profits in a highly competitive landscape. The goal is to change the way software was written to the way software should be a tactical business enabler. The new concepts of "design to value" and "developer impact on product profitability" show the end goals of having a product team with an above average Tech Maturity score and optimization or cost aware driven application engineering decisions made with the use of data, insights, analytics, and data exploration like they never had before. The goal is to not bring the technical debt or force a bad practice to work in the cloud and ensure that the preparation of the tech maturity is completed beforehand in the existing datacenter environment. The power of script driven datacenters and the public cloud product arsenal from AWS and other top cloud providers is amazing, and at 1,000 new products per year, you had better prepare your developers somehow for what they will be driving. Cloud debt is much easier to accumulate than Colo debt, at least colo's had a physical and time limiter for creation, not cloud. You have been warned. I have seen over 50 enterprises cloud operations, they all complain about cloud debt and cloud budget variance because they did not train the folks that incepted the problem in the first place how to do it the right way and give the developers the data needed to continuously make information backed decisions, not gut feel guesses.

Have you ever asked yourself what any person with a AWS create role can purchase and commit the enterprise to with little to no guidance or governance? Therein lies the opportunity to allow them to create freely, test, iterate and spawn new ideas in minutes or days. Therein lies the responsibility and placement of the burden of governance, risk and control. Perhaps tech maturity, team maturity, and technology finance maturity of public cloud platforms come together for your enterprise this year?

Thank you Sherry and Vignesh for stewarding the open sourcing of this great resource and all the tm tech team members who contributed and rely on it to produce awesome new features to our fans faster everywhere.