1. The Paved Road at
Netflix:
At the Junction of
Freedom and
Responsibility
Dianne Marsh
Director of Engineering, Netflix
dmarsh@netflix.com
@dmarsh

2. Freedom and Responsibility at Netflix
https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

3. Freedom

4. Responsibility
▪ Remote Process Communication
▪ Service Discovery
▪ Monitoring and Alerting
▪ Incident Management
▪ Logging
▪ Security
▪ Reliable and Repeatable Builds and Deployments
▪ … and more

5. A more common alternative …

6. Describing the Paved Road

7. The Paved Road is …
A concept, formalizing a set of expectations and commitments
between the centralized teams and our engineering customers

8. The Paved Road provides …
Well-integrated, supported machinery to enable engineers to focus
on delivering their core business value and to socialize the
centralized team’s support

9. The Paved Road is NOT mandatory
Individual teams may choose not to use the
Paved Road at any time

10. Where’s that next great
idea coming from?

11. Paving the Road
Investments to pave a road (or elements of it) are made in
partnership with the consuming team, striving to understand the
net-value of the effort, and prioritizing against other initiatives

12. Making it
Work

13. Not all paved roads are equal

14. Java: best

15. JavaScript: getting better

16. Python: there’s pavement …

17. Streamline Developer Experience, but don’t implement
as Least Common Denominator

18. Newt
▪Project Bootstrapping with relevant hooks
▪Desktop/laptop setup
▪Integration with CI and Netflix Services
▪Build/Test code with Docker Container
▪Highly configurable

19. App Type flexible so that individual teams can own

20. Newt App Types
▪Java
▪Docker
▪Node.js
▪Ruby on Rails
▪NodeQuark
▪Titus cron
▪Documentation Sites
▪Development Roots

21. General Philosophy

22. Formalize commitments with stakeholders

23. Encourage Informed Adventures,
not accidental detours

24. Identify common patterns across teams

25. Empower centralized teams to innovate

26. Leave your ego at the door

27. Socialize Change

28. Share Ideas in Technical Circles

29. Break through the Information Overload

31. The Payoff

32. Engineers can focus on their domains

33. Reduces friction and
cognitive load

34. Streamlines security and
other critical functions

35. Best of Breed solutions take root

36. Reduces support cost

37. Returning from an
Adventure?

39. The adventurer charts the course back

40. The adventurer charts the course back
But … be flexible

41. The adventurer charts the course back
But … be flexible
And help them bring back
what they learned!

43. Thank you
Dianne Marsh
Director of Engineering, Netflix
@dmarsh