I was recently sent to Gluecon 2018 in Broomfield Colorado, which was a two day conference.

One of my favorite talks was “What Statistical Process Control Taught Me About DevOps” by Jowanza Joseph. Jowanza works for One Click Retail and found himself updating his company’s infrastructure to be able to handle terabytes of data a day. One day, in the gym, he noticed an individual reading book on the manufacturing process. Jowanza asked to borrow the book and as he was reading through it, he noticed the many parallels that software development could take from the manufacturing industry.

Jowanza went on to discuss what Statistical Process Controls (SPC) were, while also stating:

  • eliminate specialized processes
    • they can cause backlogs as only the few trained individuals can complete the tasks
  • be data driven
    • rather than focused on feelings or guesses
  • be process orientated
    • with documentation from start to finished
  • understanding boundaries
    • Saying “My query is fast” or “My query takes five seconds” is not very descriptive
    • While saying “My query takes on average 12 seconds, while 99% of the queries will return in 15 seconds”

Additionally, the USE method was mentioned:

  • Utilization: Percentage of time a resource is in use
  • Saturation: Amount of work the resource must use
  • Errors: Number of errors occurred

Along with the RED method:

  • Rate: Number of requests per second
  • Errors: Number of failed requests
  • Duration: Time required to process a request

Overall, I thought Jowanza was an excellent speaker and his content about borrowing ideologies from other fields and applying them to Software was a unique idea expressed at Gluecon.