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Continuous Delivery in the Classroom: Why Primary Teaching Needs a DevOps Mindset

As some of you may know I have the privilege of serving as Chair of Governors for one of the UK’s largest primary schools, an institution that maintains high academic attainment despite its significant scale. In addition to this, I sit on the Trust’s EdTech advisory forum. Combining my consultancy background with a DevOps lens, I’ve observed a clear opportunity: while teaching standards are high, the operational framework could benefit significantly from Agile and DevOps methodologies to enable teachers to do what they do best.

This is not a critique of the frontline staff; their dedication is exemplary, they work incredibly hard and no matter if they are a teacher, a teaching assistant or office staff, they are all focused on enabling children to reach their full potential. Modern schools, and by extension the MATs (Multi Academy Trusts) operate as complex businesses where the “product” they provide is critical to the future of the country, education. By applying a DevOps mindset, we can unlock efficiencies and accelerate educational outcomes in ways that traditional models sometimes struggle to match given the yearly cycle in which education operates.

As anyone who knows me can attest I not only sound like a mix between a pirate and a farmer from the rural southwest I’m also very proud of the region, its vast heritage, lore, stories and history. One of the most famous of these stories is king Arthur who is famously from the region, as you can expect from me by now I can find a way to link anything to devops and the Arthurian legend can provide some key insights into how we handle disaster recovery and business continuity, for clarity for those who don’t deal with these concepts daily think of it like this Arthur is Disaster Recovery (DR). The Round Table is Business Continuity (BC).

King Arthur is not remembered because Camelot never failed. Camelot failed constantly. Knights died, kings vanished, and the realm fractured. But in the South West of England, from the hill fort of Cadbury Castle in Somerset (Arthur’s “head office” and primary data centre) to Glastonbury Tor (where Arthur was taken when Camelot fell, or our cold storage site as he lies still waiting for when we need him again), the legend survived not because of 100% uptime, but because of a regional commitment to recovery.

While Tintagel was where Arthur was “deployed” (please forgive the pun), the rivers of Bristol acted as the high-speed “network” for the kingdom’s trade and defense, the system was never perfect (and what system ever is if we’re honest with ourselves). Camelot was a disaster recovery (DR) strategy in a sword and sandals costume.

Camelot Was Never “Highly Available”, it was a single point of failure disguised as a golden age.

One king. One court. When Arthur was present, things worked. When he was wounded, betrayed, or awkwardly off on a mystical side quest across the Somerset Levels, the system degraded fast.

This was not an HA (Highly Available) architecture. This was a monolith with a heroic uptime record and absolutely terrible fault tolerance.

And yet, Camelot keeps coming back and is ingrained in the psyche of the country.

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The Hyborian Guide to Agile Leadership: Lessons from Cimmeria

What is best in life DevOps?

In the chaotic landscape of modern software development and platform support, the “Kingdoms of Monolith” are falling. To survive, those old legacy “kingdoms” must embrace the speed of Agile and the cold hard steel of DevOps. But tools alone don’t win battles; leadership and culture does.

To understand how to lead a transformation of the scale of transforming a “kingdom”, we look to the rugged age of High Adventure. What better way to start off the year than by examining one of my favorite Christmas films (Don’t fact check me!), the cult classic Conan the Barbarian, at first glance it doesn’t seem like this fantasy tale of swords and sorcery has much to do with the modern world of Devops, but as you’ve seen from previous articles I can make anything about Devops and enjoy using pop culture to broaden understanding of the concepts and tenets of DevOps and Agile leadership. Why not learn about Devops leadership while indulging in some campy fun with a classic Christmas film (If Die hard counts then a story about a guy in a loincloth is basically a nativity play. ) thats the greatest since Gremlins.

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How Shadow IT Becomes a Genestealer Threat

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war DevOps. The Imperium of Man slowly crumbles, the emperor sits on the golden throne looking over hos domain. Yet, the greatest threat often doesn’t come screaming from the void; it comes from a more insidious source: The Genestealer Cult known as Shadow IT.

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In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only technical debt.

If you’ve ever stared at a decades-old code and thought, “we can’t touch that, it’s sacred”, congratulations, you’re already living in the 41st millennium.

The Warhammer 40K universe is a place where humanity’s technology has stagnated for ten thousand years. Once upon a time they innovated, developed marvels beyond our wildest dreams. Now, they worship their machines like gods. Engineers chant litanies before deploying code. No one knows how anything actually works, they just hope it keeps working.

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Now you’ve got a basic interface working on the board its time to do something more interesting, lets run a web server on the board, this could be used to extend in the future and control parts of the board using the web server as an interface, we will start with an unsecured site as this is much simpler and avoids the need for certificates.

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So you’ve decided to get started with working on a micro controller, good for you, it can be an incredibly rewarding experience and can open up a lot of options for just messing around or for building something you can truly enjoy.

Incident management, by the very nature of the beast, is never clean. It’s noisy, confusing, fraught with danger, and full of people with strong opinions on the best way to resolve the issues. Which, coincidentally, is also the opening of Borderlands (you can pick your favorite in the franchise—they are all relevant).

Borderlands is one long, barely-contained disaster, a futuristic world that’s broken down, with science gone mad, and the heroes improvising solutions. If that doesn’t sound like a war room during a Severity-1 outage, I don’t know what is (if you know, you know).

Beneath the chaos, however, there is a method to the madness, a rough wisdom about how to survive and thrive when everything’s gone awry and there is a hoard of angry customers demanding to know what’s happening and how you will fix it.

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As anyone who knows me can tell you, I am a very proud West Country resident. Yorkshire may be god’s own country, but the West Country is the heart; it’s old, wild, and where nature and legend meet to form a magical, mystical region. Where else can you find a giant horse carved into the hillside, an ancient druid monument, and Camelot? Nothing is more West Country than The Wurzels (except maybe scrumpy). While listening to some of their songs recently, I thought to myself: Is there any way I can combine my love of The Wurzels with my love of technology? And so, this article was born.

In the world of technology and DevOps, with the need and desire to constantly go faster, it’s easy to forget the simple, foundational principles that make systems work efficiently. Oddly enough, I found my most important lessons in these principles not in conferences or the latest shiny tool, but listening to the great and legendary band The Wurzels.

For those who are unfamiliar (and I don’t know why you would be), The Wurzels, best known for their song, “The Combine Harvester,” sing about the joys, trials, and tribulations of rural life, often with a good dose of humour. Their music, on the surface, seems worlds away from continuous delivery, idempotent configuration, and immutable infrastructure. Yet, their most popular songs reveal four core DevOps truths.