Pivotal Cloud Foundry Release Engineering: Moving Integration Upstream Where It Belongs

In our current release engineering workflow, upstream teams do the integration work for us. We focus on coordinating the integration work from those 20 teams, instead of integrating their products directly.

This was not the case one year ago.

This transition was not a simple effort, as there are 20+ Open and Closed Source teams that contribute bits to Pivotal’s commercial offering of the Cloud Foundry PaaS (Platform as a Service). Through automation and system optimization, Release Engineering has become a team that focuses on enabling upstream integration into our product directly by the teams building a specific component of the Product. This is allowing us to perform integration where it is most effective and least costly.

This presentation describes how we've approached the transition from integrators to enablers and what we've learned along the way.