Building distributed systems is notoriously hard... building a distributed team, even more so. At Elastic — the company behind Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash — everything is distributed; the company and our products. This talk dives into the details of how Elastic is thriving on its distributed model: How Elastic started to be distributed by design. What our shared values are and what we have learned as we progressed and grew to our current size. What the day of an Elastician can look like. What we are using in terms of tooling. How we hire and onboard new employees.

1. Building Distributed Systems
in Distributed Teams
Sebastian Grodzicki @ DevOpsDays 2019
@sebgrodzicki

2. Who is working from
home?
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3. Who is working from a
coworking space?
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4. Who is working from an
office?
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5. Who can work from home for
1 day/week?
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6. $ whoami
Sebastian Grodzicki
• Engineering Manager at
• ex-CTO at SHOWROOM & GoldenLine
• #LifeAtElastic
@sebgrodzicki

7. ELK Elastic Stack

8. Cluster

9. Stats
…
…
…
…
employees
countries
languages
time zones

10. Stats

11. Stats
+1600
+40
+30
+20
Elasticians
countries
languages
time zones

12. 27 offices

13. DISTRIBUTED
by design

14. Founders

15. DISTRIBUTED
not remote

16. Office

17. Coworking space

18. Home office

19. Home office

20. Home office

21. Home office

22. X-SchoolX-School

23. Elastic Heart

24. Elastic Heart

25. Elastic Heart

26. Engineering All Hands

27. Global All Hands

28. Volunteer Time Off

29. Our Source Code

37. Team

38. Leaders
Team
Lead
Product
Lead
Tech
Lead

39. Meetings
• weekly team planning meeting
• 1:1 with your manager
• team time (informal/off-topic)

40. Bugpool,
Demo day,
Company All Hands, etc.

41. Release train
Development QA
ReleaseFeature freeze
QA
ReleaseFeature freeze
QA
ReleaseFeature freeze
Development
Development
Development

42. Semantic Versioning
7 4 2..
major minor patch

43. Downsides

44. Downsides
• share the pain of timezones
• communication can fail
• cultures are different
• decisions can drag

45. Tools

46. Tools

47. Tools

48. Tools

49. Tools

50. Hiring

51. Hiring
• Age, gender, location, race, … is just an attribute
• hard technical & soft professional skills
• 1,000+ CVs per week
• no bullshit
• max. 5 interviews

52. Hiring
500 to 600: 5 months
600 to 700: 3 months
700 to 800: 2 months

53. Hiring

54. Hiring
130
9
arrivals
departures

55. Who wants to work from
an office?
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56. Who wants to work from
home?
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57. Questions?

58. Thank you!