“Devopsification & the Cloud”, Phil from SkyScanner Who are SkyScanner? 800 staff, 10 offices, 50% staff are engineers

Why DevOps?

Rapid growth necessitates change.

Technological & organisational change both required, tools don’t help if can’t use them effectively. Empower your engineers

**Adopted a squads / tribes model **(ala Spotify) - teams between 1-10 people, localised ownership of sections of functionality from design through to development & running it, faster decision making - “You build it, you run it” - drives engineers to do things properly.

Delegation of previously centralised capabilities

Can’t get enough good ops engineers. Adopted cloud (AWS), currently still running hybrid as still have traditional systems.

Give control of resources to squads “More curator, less gatekeeper”.

Our most expensive resource is engineer time, not infrastructure.

Microservices beats monolith

Works well with the squad model, as can’t have a squad working with a large monolith

Fail fast, fail forward etc

Data driven experiences

Optimise, standardise and automate all the things

Super important, spend more time & energy building user facing product

Question from audience

“Some companies have moved away from squads as led to war”

There was some empire building at the start, but we quickly took steps to avoid this, kept tribal leadership, and agressively moved people between squads. Sometimes not always easy due to skillsets.

Short term focus.

Biggest challenge when adopting devops & cloud

Trying to find people with thrift skill set. You can’t, part of reason is that consultancies poach those people & pay large salaries. You need skills in house.

Develop staff internally

Developer Enablement Tribe

Define & promote standards

Create common tooling

Support common platforms

Cloud specific

AWS architectural guidance

Set and enforce best practices

Provide internal training

Who?

Get people who are enthusiastic and have a mix of development & operations

Make development faster vs risks?

** **

We split development and production into separate AWS accounts

Production = secure by default, only permit the bare minimum to get the job done

Sandbox = open permissions by default

Confession - we still have (small) dedicated operations, security and network teams

Self service portal

Administer cost management

Security

Does this actually deliver value?

3 years ago took 6-8 weeks to release a new feature, not viable when require to be competitive

Today - 6-8 minutes