Mobile Apps & Devops

[Patrick Debois]

Aloha group, 

for the past year I've worked in the Mobile space. With a background in web apps I found that delivering Apps is quite a different toolchain.

I noticed a developer/operations divide there too, with many developers submitting it to the Appstore and done. 

First step in the Continuous Delivery process was to automate builds (annoying with undocumented apis from Apple)

Then running tests we experienced it slow to run integration tests making it hard to run all the time

For trying to avoid the Appstore approval we've used hybrid/native approach.

We went on integrating logging and metrics in the Mobile App , having it correlate with our backend logs.

While doing this we tried to close the feedback gap between dev & ops by making logs, metric & settings available.

Then we added Feature flags to enable/disable features at runtime but also remotely increasing debug levels and memory errors.

So as you can see the journey is similar the toolset is different (automating xcode is real fun :D)

fwiw - here's a collection of tools I found - http://www.slideshare.net/jedi4ever/mobile-delivery-with-a-devops-mindset-velocityconf-nyc-2015

I'm looking for others their experiences ; it's pretty easy to find how to code an app, but hard to find good stories on supporting apps.

Also if you are optimizing apps for fast network delivery, power consumption do let us know.

If I still haven't lost you (I know you like your servers) , please share your stories or forward this to a person who know who has to deal with these things.

We're running a devopsdays like event on Mobile App Delivery with the help of Amazon & Etsy and others.

Moble Delivery Days - 21 & 22th of March at Amazon Loft  - San Fransico - http://mobiledeliverydays.org

Tickets are free and on sale now , and hopefully we find some sponsors too (hint :)

Hope to learn from you!