While DevOps has become a mainstay at most tech major technology companies over the last decade, interpretations and applications of the culture and set of development practices it encompasses vary from team to team. For example, some companies push for speed and the automation of everything they see, others take a more methodical approach, and some prefer to prioritize flexibility.
To learn more about how different teams approach the union of developer creativity with operations-style practicality, we spoke with DevOps leaders at three Seattle area tech companies to learn what makes their teams unique.
ServiceNow’s cloud-based software platform uses a variety of complex technologies to automate manual workflows across a variety of departments, including IT, security, customer service, human resources and more. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, the company has offices all over the world — including its local base at Kirkland’s swanky Carillon Point.
Cloud Automation DevOps Director Atul Saini and Senior Manager Pavan Velagaleti said ServiceNow is all in on DevOps.
What makes your DevOps culture unique?
Saini: ServiceNow embraces DevOps culture — the idea of shared responsibility and shared goals — as we work on customer needs. This approach removes barriers between teams and enables faster delivery to market. We maintain a holistic mindset and collaborative work ethic to improve our own productivity and also the reliability of operations.
Engineers at ServiceNow are solving a different technology challenge than at other companies. We’re building a platform — not just an app — that is continually evolving, adding features, growing and incorporating advanced technologies.
We believe in quicker feedback loops, constant communication, transparency and honesty between the teams.”
How does your team balance demands for quality with speed when delivering software?
Velagaleti: We invest heavily in automation for speed and repeatability. We enforce quality gates in our releases, maintaining world-class quality. DevOps culture is the key to delivering quality software with speed.
We believe in quicker feedback loops, constant communication, transparency and honesty between the teams. This allows us to resolve issues faster and, ultimately, deliver releases to market faster. We track metrics very closely and make improvements to our processes, infrastructure and software, which in turn increases the satisfaction levels of our customers.
Seattle-based 98point6 is taking on one of the biggest problems in the United States: healthcare. For a yearly fee, 98point6 connects users with physicians, who can remotely diagnose and prescribe treatments for a wide variety of medical conditions through a mobile app. The company has treated patients texting in from work, airports, coffee shops and in transit, and raised $50 million last October to roll its services out across the country.
Director of Systems Engineering Thomas Van Doren said his team provisions all of its AWS infrastructure through code.
What makes your DevOps culture unique?
98point6 is a healthcare tech company operating in the cloud. This enables us to focus on building, securing and operating our services and applications while our cloud service provider takes care of rote tasks like OS patching. We invested early in infrastructure as code tools and processes, and today 100 percent of our AWS infrastructure is provisioned through code — along with other services like PagerDuty, Sumo Logic and New Relic.
This has enabled us to build reusable infrastructure components, as code, so engineers across the entire engineering team can manage their own infrastructure in accordance with industry best practices and within our regular development process. Each engineer shares the responsibility for operational excellence at 98point6.
Because our patients trust us with their most sensitive data, we don’t sacrifice quality — we prioritize it over everything else.”
How does your team balance demands for quality with speed when delivering software?
Because our patients trust us with their most sensitive data, we don’t sacrifice quality — we prioritize it over everything else. This is accomplished without compromising agile execution through an approach we call “shift left,” as in, “shift left in the development lifecycle.” We have a careful review process for our requirements and designs, and we have a thorough test program that is designed to prevent regression through CI/CD best practices.
All of this helps us identify issues and changes early in development lifecycle when it’s less costly. We maintain a low operational debt through weekly operational reviews and blameless retrospectives for production incidents. This enables us to focus more of our time on building features than putting out operational fires.
OpenMarket’s platform helps businesses build and manage text message-based marketing campaigns, while its APIs integrate SMS, RCS and MMS messaging campaigns into a business’ existing tech stack. The company’s dashboards let users know how their campaigns are working, while the experts on its staff are on hand to help customers build their own customer experiences.
Director of Technical Operations Bruce Painter said his team uses collaborative software to boost efficiency and visibility for all members.
What makes your DevOps culture unique?
We have a “right tool for the right job” approach to solving systemic challenges in both our data center and cloud infrastructure. Primarily, all of our automation tooling is source control-focused, which promotes flexibility — we steer away from the cookie cutter approach that others often follow.
With source control-focused methodologies, we reap the benefits of CI/CD tool sets that are available. To support our organizational dynamics, we employ modern collaboration tools to allow our diverse and global teams to work asynchronously and efficiently. All this is in support of OpenMarket’s core values: Value People, Be Authentic, Take Ownership, and Deliver as a Team.
We believe that the majority of your time should be spent on process improvement, rather than executing the process itself.”
How does your team balance demands for quality with speed when delivering software?
Utilizing carefully selected automation tools and methodologies helps us to ensure the quality of the services that we deliver. We believe that the majority of your time should be spent on process improvement, rather than executing the process itself — otherwise your quality and velocity will suffer. We utilize Agile processes to emphasize iterative, incremental and evolutionary development with feedback processes all along the way.
