Here’s the scenario – you are a development team tasked with making the life of other developers easier. Your organization is breaking a monolithic service into many micro services and the current process for spinning up a new service and all the associated pieces is laborious, error prone, and not elastic at all. Your organization wants a self-service system that allows a team to spin up the scaffolding for a new service in days without being blocked by other teams.

If you have thoughts on this – I have some questions:

• Have you done this before?
• How would you describe what you built?
• More interesting to me, what were the increments?
• Did you try to use existing tools?
• What was the team that delivered those increments comprised of (Ops, developers, both)? I know many Ops are developers – but mindsets are probably different.
• How long did it take?

Keep in mind, I’m not talking about just deploying code, I’m talking about creating an entire dev workflow pipeline from desktop to prod – automatically. The assumption is that if you aren’t doing Continuous Deployment, you are at least doing Continuous Delivery. This probably looks something like a private PaaS at the end of the day – but automation that extends beyond just spinning up machines, it extends to CI, monitoring, everything.

If this story has been told in a blog post you have, or if you just copied what someone else wrote in their blog post, point me that way, but I want to hear about YOUR experience implementing it.

See, I am fairly certain that the answer to this question changes depending on the makeup of the group that built it. Further, I suspect that without the necessary increments – any group will build it wrong (like any software). So for a group that’s been down that road, I’m more interested in the journey than the destination.

Reply via email, in the comments, add links, use the twitters, whatever. I just want to learn – this is not the start of a debate.