 Hi everyone, we all have heard about the company success stories, right? How Microsoft implements machine learning and production with Kubeflow and DevOps, right? The people and the Apple people and his journey to the cloud native. The seamless customer experience powered by Q&As at Walmart. And how Debbie Shia almost gets fired from Spotify, right? But what about small companies in Central America? Is that even possible in this context? Was it already been done before? Well, let's take a look. But first, let's see what is what Central America is results that it is a geographic region between North and South America, conformed by seven countries. El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama with a summarized GDP just below Columbia and with English level, low as most of the countries in the other in America affecting the access to information and education. Companies in the area has the fame to have a permanent limit budget. All and a small tech department, big resistance to change, dusty app over dusty server. And if it's working, don't touch it, don't look at it and don't even think at it because it can stop working philosophy. And there is a lot of comments like this coming from the community members. All that infrastructure server and development methodology, sadly, companies here at Guatemala are not ahead. And that had started to change. And today I want to share my story of how is it to bring DevOps to a software factory in Central America. My name is Alvin Estrada. I'm a speaker and organizer at Kubernetes Guatemala, a CNCF community group. On the last 12 years, I've seen how engineers here start moving to foreign countries and start working remotely for companies there. Even I spend good five years working remotely with a team on Netherlands. I've also collaborated with some companies in my country with his cloud adoption. And now I'm collaborating with one of the biggest company in the region with his cloud adoption and DevOps journey. And this journey starts, of course, with a digital transformation. But this digital transformation is at the speed of light. As in 2020, in a matter of weeks, everything changed. Companies around the world was in a hurry to move their business to remote and online first. There was, of course, a challenge. Have any mind that most of those companies have never built a proper e-commerce before. The necessity for engineers and experienced people increase. Local banks and retailers had to duplicate their capacity on online and white platforms. Teams and technology was already, was of course not prepared for that. The necessity for a digital transformation was evident. Sadly, the necessity for a cool transformation was not that evident. Teams inside local companies had to learn on record time how to improve performance, implement automatization, scalability, observability, and improve their English. Because, of course, you need to read documentation, watch YouTube videos and deal with cloud provider supports. Because, of course, there is usually no Spanish L2 or L3 support available. As remote jobs was so popular, a strong human capital flight start as well. And it is not a secret for anyone that higher remote open a lot of opportunities. Companies start to hire more strong on this area, and most of the experienced engineer start working with international companies. But it also affect companies here, as now it's getting harder to hire tech roles as the market demands for skilled engineers. As market demands for skilled engineers is increasing, but offer is too low to satisfy it. And it's usual to find you comments like this on post jobs. With those skills, you better get a job for a foreign company. You can earn a lot. But it's also common that the adoption for new technology usually starts by someone experiencing experimenting with something he looked at a tech talk, or a cultural disruption usually starts by a small group of people. And that's why the community movement is so important here. Before 2020, the community was growing with every meet there was a number of movements and community sharing about AWS, Azure, Docker, and Google was all over the place, even the Kubernetes meetups. Sadly, during pandemics meeting stops and online events are not that attractive for people I would say. And to be honest, many communities are disappearing or not longer being maintained. A new engineers usually don't know there was or is a movement on their area. So if you're looking at this talk, and you are wondering if there is a CNCF community on your country, please take a look at community.cncf.io, probably you can help the movement or never start a chapter in your city. Being part of the community helps you to know people and can be crucial part of your formation. I would say big part of the cultural and tech adoption in Latin America has been done thanks to the community forums. I can tell this because I was there giving an online online talk about DevOps with Omer as main character at the Kubernetes community at Guatemala. When one of these instance contact me, say that the company he was working just to start with a digital transformation and require help to adopt and automate. There was some stuff already running on cloud, the company has changed his technology director just eight months ago, and the digital transformation was ongoing. They offered me a position to help with the cloud adoption as a DevOps engineer. The opportunity to live my own things project was in front of me. And two months later, I was there about to know how is it to bring DevOps to a software factory in Central America. But honestly, I was more or less like Omer here. So once in the company, I was involved in a lot of meetings they present me at the DevOps. I was going to help teams with new standards, security and cloud adoption, and please add the DevOps if you need help, if you need help deploying to the cloud. Of course, I had the support of the entire team, having in mind that I was in a new role, just created because of a necessity coming from teams. On my first month, I was inviting to knowledge transfer meetings. One of the engineer was leaving the company, so there was a meeting to understand his assignation and application he was involved. I will never forget that when I was presented and the team mentioned that I was there to help with the DevOps adoption, he said, good luck with that. With that don't you know, and it was evident that he was already sourced and looking for a change. As you may think, I had tons of other meetings sitting there with depth to understand the workloads, building containers together and explaining more about what I do and what DevOps pretends. It was clear that most of the new, it had something to do with automation and cloud, but not sure about what else. The development team has decided to go for JavaScript first, and the main development language. This was because of his popularity, number of tools and a good number of developers on the market. The teams for new products was designed to be conformed by a score master, a software architect, a team lead and a team of developers and QA analysts. There was already the problems on cloud, but the stuff does not start right there. The teams was still struggling with the stuff they was getting from the business. As the user story usually looked like this, and the QA team suggest to start using Gherkin for it. The user story start to be well-defined with stories with a set of atomic features and well-defined scenarios. If you're guessing which tools are we adopting, basically our services are done with Node.js. Frontend application will react with code scanned by Sonar, that's done with just Serenity and Podman. Together with the cloud adoption and agile methodologies, the software factory was refactoring the QA process. I learned a lot helping the team to implement QA tools on the pipeline. It requires, of course, a training for the QA engineers to adopt technology as most of them was manual tester, with a low or no technical skills. Deployment into the cloud are no done with Kubernetes and Helm charts. Our on-premise deployments on Linux are no done with Ansible and Podman, just because we want to be cool on. The monitoring on operation is done using Prometheus, Istio, Envoy, Grafana and integrated cloud tools, not into fancy. During the implementation and adoption of new technology, a new elite team emerged and start to help teams with adoption as well. Some of them have never interacted with a Linux terminal before and now they are configuring Nginx, deploying containers and moving around with almost no problem. Documentation was crucial as they are now helping our servers team to get in touch with platform and perform configuration tasks on production environments. We have also started with trainings across the entire organization to help with methodology adoption, explaining the problems we're going to attend, and why DevOps is important. I made my talk about DevOps with a symptom in struggling with the same problem we had at his journey to DevOps, with a strong inception of DevOps equals culture, of course. But with a great power comes great responsibility. We adopt a number of technology and create a number of kind of ownership calls. Now we are considering what we have done and the technology we have with the security teams and make sure it can be certified our tools and products. I cannot share a lot of info about the company, but this is something I can share. The company now moved from 10% of loads on cloud on 2019 to almost 80% of loads on 2020. Time required to develop and test a single feature moved from two weeks to a single day, not just because the process and tech is better, but because the feature definition improved and teams evolved. And here are a couple things we learned. Things need to be done in the right way. Small teams are easier to transform and manage. Digital transformation means team transformation, team transformation requires investment. The transformation must spread across the entire organization and there is no such thing as a silver bullet. And I also have a message for all my folks, for all my folks here that are still guessing if it's possible. Estamos frente a una de las más grandes transformaciones tecnológicas en nuestra región y debes de asegurarte que puedes confiar en ti y en tu equipo. Posiblemente seas tú que en la próxima vez venga aquí y cuentes la historia de ante toda la comunidad. And be prepared because DevSecOps is coming. But we probably can talk about this next time. Thanks.