Intuit at Perforce Merge 2013: Automating Cloud Delivery? Control Everything

Thanks to the cloud and its tools, compute resources today can be made available instantly and managed easily. At Intuit, we produce personal finance and small business products including Quicken, Mint, QuickBooks and TurboTax. My role as an infrastructure architect is to drive continuous delivery for traditional and cloud-hosted projects in the Payment Systems Division. I’m looking forward to sharing our experiences at the Merge 2013 Perforce Conference. This talk follows the journey of the Intuit Payments Division as we move to automate and control everything (using Perforce, of course).

These days, you can automate host operating system configuration as well as the installation and configuration of middleware and software applications. Ultimately, this “configuration as code” (e.g., the scripts, recipes, configuration files and job definitions that drive the tools) is as important as the code itself. That means we must baseline and manage it like any other software.

Further, as we scale up services while using cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, we discover that ad-hoc processes don't work at scale. We're growing, adding more service layers, and getting a lot more complex. That means we have to control and automate everything. In the 15 years or so that I’ve been a Perforce fan, I’ve seen how fast and reliable it is at versioning everything. I’ll share how we use it in our quest for continuous delivery in the cloud.