OpenStack Summit November 2013

A Strong Foundation was Built
A modern, supported, and secure OS.
Virtualization in production.
A capable staff.

Agility, Agility, Agility At a Personal Level
An agile methodology is critical to the continued success of the Cloud team at PayPal, but its acceptance amongst “old school” infrastructure engineers was not always easy or expected. Each person took on a personal transformation to remain relevant and important. They accepted new roles that were not always visibly aligned with their previous capabilities. They embraced change on their own schedules, finding their own path, but ultimately embracing it. The team was strong. Now we are stronger and more productive (measurable by # of meaningful deliverables year-over-year).

Finding Consistency in a Constantly Changing World
These keep us sane: JIRA, Kanban, and Daily Stand-ups
JIRA: Easy to track your work.
Kanban: Easy to understand what you should be working on.
Daily Stand-ups: Ensuring work is happening, and clearing any roadblocks.

Get Ahead of the Game and Stay Ahead
It's easy to fall behind. We did. Get ahead by being identifying where you haven't been smart. Stay ahead by automating the things that caused you to fall behind. Have each technology or service owner run a simple gap analysis by asking 6 things:
Is it highly available and resilient? Is it able to be consistently deployed and managed? Does it utilize configuration management for installation and configuration? Is it documented? Is it secure? Is it monitored?
If any of them are no, you've found a gap to address. Once you can answer yes to all of them, your next deployment or upgrade will require much less time. And before you know it, you're ahead.

Lessons Learned
Each person will transition on their own schedule based on their willingness to accept change. Don't expect an overnight turn-around in the boots on the ground. When it comes though, be prepared to deliver more products and projects than you ever thought possible, and have fun while doing it with cutting edge technologies.
There is not one way to do agile. We started with a scrum approach and quickly realized that bi-weekly sprints really didn't work well for us. We found kanban and find it well-balanced for the type of work we are doing.

I'm doing Support?!
L1+L2+L3 Support is not ideal, but for an immature product, it is required. DevOps until it's documented well and supportable by L1+L2.