Keep Your Head in the Clouds
summary
Blackboard moves from 18‑month enterprise releases to continuous cloud delivery by modularizing a monolithic Learn product, automating builds and environments, and running commit‑level pipelines that cut integration feedback from 24–36 hour to 15–30 minute feedback. The company (~700 people on Learn, ~1,000 hosted clients, ~3,000 VMs, ~8 PB storage, tens of millions LOC) adopts Jenkins, Chef, Vagrant, Gradle, AWS and OpenStack, implements infrastructure‑as‑code, central monitoring (New Relic, StatsD), and lets developers deploy to production. Acceptance testing target drops from 14 hours to <30 minutes.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:12About Blackboard Learn
- 2:34Long lead times
- 4:18What changed
- 9:18Manual testing
- 12:43Long story short
- 14:02Cloud infrastructure
- 15:14Deployment models
- 16:16Chef
- 17:08Automation
- 18:02VB Cloud
- 19:24Culture
- 20:17Organizational Structure
- 21:00Cultural Change
- 22:05What have we achieved
- 23:04What can we learn from this
- 24:29QA
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