DevOps at Spotify focuses on developers and operations working together harmoniously through a culture of empathy and failure-friendliness. Key aspects of Spotify's approach include embedding operations team members directly in squads to provide infrastructure support, coordinating through an incident manager when necessary to address systemic issues, and breaking down silos between teams. Spotify cultivates this culture by reinforcing values of collaboration, learning from failures, and taking risks through visible reminders and encouraging discussion of mistakes.

1. DevOps at Spotify
Danielle Jabin

2. How do we at Spotify
makeAgile and DevOps
work?

3. Over 75 million active
users everymonth

4. Access to more than 30
million songs

5. What is DevOps?

6. Developers and
Operations working in
symbiotic harmony.

7. What’s at the bottom of the rabbit hole?

8. I’m here, reporting live.

9. There is no “right” way.

10. Caveat: there are some
wrong ways…but there
is no “right” way.

11. Overheard at Spotify:
“it depends”.

12. What helps makesAgile
successful at Spotify
also makes DevOps
successful.

13. Is it magical
tooling and
processes?

14. DevOps is not just
about magical tooling
and processes.
Noa
@blippie

15. Ops in Squads
‣ "The Operations team has since
disbanded as a formal team and
most of them are now squads
within the Service Availability
product area, focusing primarily on
providing infrastructure, tools, and
support to enable other Squads to
meet this goal."
Ops in Squads Guild
Embeddings
SRE Unconference
SRE Lunch and Learn

16. Incident Manager On-Call (IMOC)
‣ "Most incidents and outages at
Spotify are handled by an
operationally responsible squad (or
two) without the need for a
coordinator. IMOC helps with the
remainder.”
Coordinate as necessary
Address systemic or infrastructure issues

17. Is it about finding
unicorns?

18. DevOps is not about
finding unicorns.
Noa
@blippie

19. As long asyou have the
mindset, the skillset can
be learned.

20. What is the
“secret sauce”
then?

21. DevOps is about
culture, empathy.
Noa
@blippie

22. We’re all on the same team.
• Working together, failing together
• Learning from failure and success, again and again
• Removing silos

23. “Failures are finger
posts on the road to
achievement.” - C.S.
Lewis

24. Huh?

25. Ifyou want more luck,
take more chances.

26. How does Spotify
cultivate a failure-
friendly culture?

27. Spotify values on the office walls

28. Fail Wall

29. Reinforcement and repetition
That’s this guy
(CTO)

30. Imagine this: it’syour
first month on the job,
andyou’ve justvery
publiclybroken some
firewall settings.

31. What happens next?

32. Others chime in…

33. And more…

34. And more…

35. And even more!

36. How can you build
a failure-friendly
culture in your
company?

37. Cultivate mindset first.

39. Questions?

40. Thank You!