devops - nothing stays the same

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DevOps - Nothing Stays The SameMichael Maibaum

@mmaibaum

Precis

Sky Betting & Gaming has become one of the largest online operators in the UK, undergoing a period of sustained high growth in customer numbers, transaction rate, staff size, and number of systems. Five years ago, the company established its first DevOps team, and since then, DevOps has become a major part of the way Sky Betting & Gaming does things. However, what that means keeps changing. Michael Maibaum describes how the DevOps function has changed repeatedly over the last few years to help the company continue to move fast and keep systems operating through organizational and technical challenges.Originally, the DevOps team was established as a group of like-minded engineers keen to smooth the delivery of software into operations and make it run better. As the business grew, the engineering teams were split and the accumulated DevOps knowledge distributed into those new groups, but the team soon found out that things didn’t fit into a distributed function and features of the platform that need ownership. As a result, platform teams were formed to produce products that other teams use. Sky Betting & Gaming’s DevOps experts now come in two categories: those that directly work in or with individual (product) engineering teams and those that deliver a platform that makes life easier for the rest of the engineering function.It is easy to see a narrow definition of DevOps as part of the function of a specific engineering team. However, in the experience of Sky Betting & Gaming, to achieve a truly effective delivery and operational culture (and indeed, DevOps) once you have hundreds of engineers requires investment in the platform as a product in and of itself.Michael outlines the history of DevOps at Sky Betting & Gaming and explains how the company has taken its DevOps philosophy into its vendors as it takes its first steps into the cloud.

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Introducing Sky Betting & Gaming

• One of the top 3 online gambling operators in the UK

• 3 Categories of product

• Sportsbook

• Free Sports related content

• Gaming

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A Diverse Technology Stack

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In the Beginning

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A Story of Change & Growth

2010 2015

£50M

£350M• Business grew slowly for the first 8

years post-acquisition

• Interactive tv was seen as the next big thing

• Major growth period starts in ~2008

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2008

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Infrastructure & Ops Only

• Tech Team

• No in-house development

• Hosting and operating third party vendors applications

• Waterfall project management and delivery

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Focus on the Web• Increased focus on the web, but still delivered by third party vendor software teams

• Starting to deliver real customer & revenue growth at this point, company profits start to grow.

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The End of the Beginning

• Business wanted to increase velocity

• More frequent change

• Cheaper to deliver new features

• More control

• Time to bring the user experience in-house

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The First ProblemHow to improve delivery & reliability from the in-house software teams?

Vendor

Ops

Dev

Backlog Wip Done Test Live

Delivery Team 1

Infrastructure

Service Desk

1st Line On Call

The First Answer - 2011

DevOps Team

2nd Line On Call

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DevOps

• Build tooling focussed on developer productivity and system reliability

• First CI pipelines with Jenkins

• Load testing, capacity and scaling (large, peaky events)

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Typical Saturday (Bets & Logins)

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Centralised DevOps?

• Probably not want what you want to aspire to

• But… Can be a good way to start

• Start the cultural shift

• Solve the problem of not enough ‘DevOps’ to go around

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DevOps Starting to Work

• Fit in well with increasing emphasis of agile delivery (Scrum, then Kanban)

• Central team provided a concentration of capability and culture

• Demonstrable wins important for adoption

• In-House Dev going well enough that we start work on Sky Vegas ‘in-house’ front end

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Commits/MonthCommits/Release

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March 2012We go from 'does anyone think we will be using the in-house site for Grand National?' to 'does anyone think we *won't* be using the in-

house site?'

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Soon we had another problem…How do we manage configuration for Disaster Recovery?

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Config ManagementConfigureServer - Many custom perl scripts

Revision control via

something.pl.freds-test

something.pl.bak, something.pl.bak2, something.pl.old,

something.pl.not-sure-what-this-is-but-scared-to-delete-it

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Platform Evolution

• Another Centralised Team

• This time born out of infrastructure and the DevOps team

• Created with a specific purpose (fix config management for DR, aka Chef All the Things)

• This turned out to be hard - At least 1.5 years effort

• Lots of concurrent change, with little effective standardisation

Publish

Applications

Infrastructure Code (Chef, Ruby,

ServerSpec)

Publish

Application Code (PHP, NodeJS, React,

Java)

Release

Configuration

Orchestra

tion

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The Beginning of the MiddleThe birth of tribes

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DevOps was in danger of becoming Ops

• With teams growing and changing the ways they work, a centralised devops team increasingly mis-aligned.

• DevOps engineers were spread out around different teams

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Tribes

• Inspired by the Spotify white paper

• Overall team getting too big

• Sub-divide into autonomous teams first at main product level (tribes, e.g. bet/gaming) then squads within those.

Core Tribe

Gaming Tribe

Infra Tribe

Bet Tribe

Growing Pains - 2013

Backlog Wip Done Test Live Backlog Wip Done Test Live

Web Experience Place & Track Squad

Platform Ops

Service Desk

1st Line On Call


Casino Squad Vegas Squad


Platform Evo Account SquadBacklog Wip Done Test Live

Infra Squad

SLM

Security

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Better…

• Alignment with development

• Ownership of Ops issues in squads

• Knowledge of services each ‘DevOp’ was working with

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But…

• The ‘DevOps’ were still the first on-call, cross tribe

• Increasingly limited knowledge of other teams services

• Team size awkward,

• too many services for individuals to know all services,

• not big enough to populate on-call with the right Ops skills

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And…

Publish

Applications


ServerSpec)

Publish


Java)

Release

Configuration

Orchestra

tion

Publish

Applications


ServerSpec)

Publish


Java)

Release

Configuration

Orchestra

tion

Integration/Test/Production

Dev Ops

Publish

Applications


ServerSpec)

Publish


Java)

Release

Configuration

Orchestra

tion

Integration/Test

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The Middle of the Middle

aka 2014

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Tribes have local focus• Optimising for local concerns

• Delivery of that product

• Improvement of their technology stack

• Improving their processes

• Local service delivery teams

• Bet WebOps team (monitoring and so on)

• Bet SRE team

• Bet Delivery Engineering

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Squads taking ownership…

• End to end ownership

• Design, Build, Run, Change, Fix, Retire

• Full support in a team - on call

• There are specialists, but they aren’t the only people that can do things

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But…

Should everything be a local concern?

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Cross Cutting Platform Features• What happened to Platform Evolution?…. It evolved into Platform Services

• There is a wider set of ‘PaaS’ like services that would be useful across the business

• Counterbalance ‘everything local’ inefficiencies

• What

• PlatCI - Our CI as a service platform (Jenkins etc),

• Shared Kafka - Messaging Platform as a Service

• Self Contained Projects - Get rid of the Dev/Ops tooling projects/tooling splits

Orchestra

tion

Application + Config

Build

JenkinsPublish

Cookbook (sbg_myapp)

• Infrastructure Code (Chef, Inspec, Custom Resources)• Application Code (PHP, NodeJS, Java)• CI Pipeline (Jenkins Pipeline, Chef)• Integration Tests (Kitchen, Chef)

pscliThe ‘Glue’ - enables the consistent composition of toolsets in different environments

• Internal Tool• Written in Go• Pulls in various ‘tools’ Docker images• Executes tools in containers, e.g.

• ChefDK• Terraform• Packer• AWS Authentication• Hashicorp Vault• Code Generation

pscli generate cookbook myapp

Git--volumes-from /git

/opt/chefdk

ChefDK--volumes-from

Docker Registry

Code Generator--volumes-from

/generator

{command runner} ~/workspace/myapp

pscli kitchen converge

Git--volumes-from

/git

{command runner}

Kitchen Suite A

Kitchen Suite B

/opt/chefdk

ChefDK--volumes-from

Docker Registry

pscli terraform apply

/opt/terraform

Terraform--volumes-from

Docker Registry

{command runner}

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Vendors

• Bad vendor relationships can cripple progress

• Or they can enable it

• It is in your interest to help them as much as you can

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Delivery Partners

• Bad vendor relationships can cripple progress

• Or they can enable it

• It is in your interest to help them as much as you can

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Tribes Getting Too Big

• Feeling the pain of growth again

• Bet Tribe bigger than whole tech organisation was 3 years earlier

• Break up of bet tribe into smaller, nested, tribes

• Making more specialist roles closer to each ‘product’ delivery squad (e.g. SRE as part of a squad)

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Two kinds of ‘DevOps’• People in every delivery team, some of these are DevOps specialists but the

whole team cares about the whole product lifecycle

• People in specialist teams working on shared platform capabilities

• Platform Services - Cross Tribe Services

• Platform Engineering (Big tribes have their own ‘shared’ services)

• Delivery Engineering (Specialists in tribes helping squads optimise reliability & delivery, especially things like release engineering, CI, etc)

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Path Dependency

• It really matters where you are, and where you are coming from

• At least as much as where you’d like to go to.

• There isn’t a path, because there isn’t an environment (and it changes)

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The End?

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There is no EndExcept of this talk

http://engineering.skybettingandgaming.com

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