John Campbell on a DevOps Success Story - Episode 64

Nov 25, 2019

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Joining Jeffrey Palermo on the show today is John Campbell, a Director of Process and Solutions Architect at Anaqua! John has been with Anaqua for just over 3 years but has been in the industry for more than 20. He originally started out as a developer but is now leading several teams in the architecting of solutions for application features, is responsible for introducing and implementing SCRUM and agile principles across the organization, and is enabling his team with DevOps practices to ease the development and deployment of work being done (as well as to improve overall productivity!)

In today's episode, John is telling his DevOps success story. His story is one of a software system that has been developed for 15 years; a monolithic architecture that is deployed as a website and a SQL server database. And now, he's gotten to the point where deploying is no big deal at all! Tune in to hear John share all the details of his journey and how he got it to the system to this point — as well as the next big steps on his journey (because the journey to excellence is never finished!)

Topics of Discussion:

[:38] Be sure to visit AzureDevOps.Show for past episodes and show notes!

[:48] Jeffrey gives a few quick announcements.

[1:01] About today's guest, John Campbell

[1:20] Jeffrey welcomes John on to the show!

[1:36] John explains gives an overview of what Anaqua does and how he got to this place in his career.

[3:59] John gets more in-depth about the scale of Anaqua.

[6:05] John gives an overview of the general shape of the system (such as how many databases, datastores, and headless offline processes there are, etc.)

[7:27] Fast-forward to today, John speaks about what the experience is like when he needs to make a change and how fast he has been able to get their cycle time.

[10:23] How many years did this system go without any automated tests?

[10:31] John speaks about the unit tests they currently do and what that looks like.

[17:03] A word from Azure DevOps Podcast's sponsor: Clear Measure.

[17:30] Jeffrey makes some announcements about upcoming events!

[19:11] Jeffrey and John speak about headless browsers.

[20:22] John speaks about the database and how they do deployments from it now.

[23:14] John speaks a bit about their lengthy integration build and the steps that need to happen to go from raw source code to a deployable artifact. He also highlights the critical steps that are important to their system in particular.

[28:16] John speaks about what their current cycle looks like for an easy change (where it's clear what to do).

[29:51] Often companies just need their technology to be able to keep up with the pace of the business. John speaks about this and then shares some of the challenges that they face.

[30:48] John shares the next big steps on his journey!

[32:30] Is the system slowly transitioning to .NET Core?

[33:45] Many teams are struggling with a large codebase that they've inherited or architectural decisions that they wish that they could change quicker than they can. John offers some words of encouragement in regards to this!

[35:25] Jeffrey thanks John for joining him in this episode!

Mentioned in this Episode:

Azure DevOps

Clear Measure (Sponsor)

.NET DevOps Bootcamp 2020 — January 16th & 17th in Austin, T.X.

.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Pre-order on Amazon here!

bit.ly/dotnetdevopsebook — Click here to download the .NET DevOps for Azure ebook!

bit.ly/dotnetdevopsbookforcommunity — Visit to get your hands on two free books to give away at conferences or events!

Jeffrey Palermo's Youtube

Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events!

Azure DevOps ASP.NET Core

Anaqua