| | November 20158CIOReviewDefining Successful Cultural Shift and a Positive Developer ExperienceBy Arne Josefsberg, EVP/CIO/Chief Infrastructure Officer, GodaddyWhen you make the decision to overhaul an aging IT infrastructure and turn it into an on-demand, OpenStack powered solution, there are a lot of moving pieces. When things go wrong on the technical side, they can be fixed. It slows down progress, but it can be resolved. The employee side is different challenge. Making sure employees are engaged and ready to make the change is the difference between success and failure. When I joined GoDaddy, the company was already in the early planning stages of moving to OpenStack as the basis of our new platform. We were moving GoDaddy from a traditional IT centric way of developing software and deploying IT infrastructure to Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment (CICD) and on-demand infrastructure. With more than 13 million customers, we couldn't just flip a switch. We have small businesses that rely on us to keep their websites and other services up and running. We were essentially repainting our airplane as it was flying.The only way we could accomplish the change was by having strong alignment at the leadership level, a culture shift and a solid execution plan. Working with our CTO, Elissa Murphy, we quickly aligned on our objectives and jointly went to our teams to get the project underway. First, we made the decision to move to a DevOps model for collaboration between our developer and infrastructure engineering teams. We've focused on bringing both our new hires, and our existing employees into the DevOps model, which has enabled us to deploy more quickly, with higher frequency and lower failures.Then, we used OpenStack to create an on-demand platform that scales to the needs of the company. Instead of taking weeks or months to get servers set up, virtual machines can be spunup in minutes. Our developers can plan, test, experiment and push to production with little to no friction. Better still, there aren't unused servers sitting in racks wasting precious resources.In order to make this happen, the team needed a tremendous amount of work. This wasn't just a technology change; it was a cultural change. We needed our developers to change their mindset from ordering servers, controlling how their servers operated and building software in a traditional IT waterfall mode to an entirely new on-demand experience using CICD. In order for the transition to work, we needed everyone to be on the same page, from the CTO and CIO, to the front line developers and engineers.During the last year or so, we learned a lot about the transition. For someone interested in doing a large scale transition, here are some of the most important things we learned:opinionin my
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