Presentation: Managing the Docker Change - Disrupt and Innovate

MetLife is a really big company, and you can imagine that the pace of change is not always fast. We took our first Docker platformed microservices-based application to production in 5 months. Docker and microservices allowed our development teams to create what once was, for us, inconceivable; a unified front-end application for our customers, employees, and agents connecting them to over 400 legacy back-end systems of record. On the engineering side, our challenge was identifying the right infrastructure approach to deliver this new solution on a global scale. To succeed we threw out the book on our traditional design approach and brought high velocity, fail-fast, and learn-fast methods to a tiger team tasked with a goal - take this to production in 5 months. This talk discusses some of the key changes we made to maximize our success, from tossing out waterfall, quickly identifying design patterns, rallying around open source, embracing test driven engineering, and literally "going to war" with our Ops teams. We had successes and obstacles to overcome along the way, and want to share a few of them. This talk is delivered by a Docker Captain embedded on the tiger team that pulled this off. The MetLife ModSquad. This is not a technical talk, but will focus on the key decisions, patterns, cultural, and technical changes we made and that were successful.