In just over a year, siroop's engineering teams went from ever more painful releases to 100s of fast and safe production deployments per day. This presentation provides some insights into how this journey unfolded and highlights some of the systemic, cultural and technological changes that were part of it.

1. Engineering@siroop
DevOps Fusion, March 2018
Patric Fornasier, CTO

2. Hello
siroop
• Swiss e-commerce marketplace!
~1.2M products, ~500 merchants
• ~3 years old
• ~200 employees • digital natives • 60 in tech (incl. product, UX, DS and ITS)
Patric
• Studied computer science in CH and Oz
• Worked at ThoughtWorks, Springer Science, Yelp, Refind and others
• Joined siroop ~1.5 years ago
First as Head of Engineering, now CTO

3. Goal
Learn a bit about
• … our journey trying to get better at software delivery
• … how we do certain things today

4. Background
siroop 1.0
• Built on top of external/commercial shop solution
• Used to validate initial business ideas
• Monolithic, heavily customised and hard/slow to evolve
siroop 2.0 (aka resiroop)
• Re-built shop in-house to increase development speed
• Became a big driver for changing how we work

5. Transformation
• Started with a small team
e.g. ~5 people in total
• Re-defined how we work
e.g. values, principles, practices, tools, etc.
• Built trust
Through working software and transparency (e.g. showcases, visible backlogs, burn ups, etc.)
• Spread to rest of organisation 🏆
By growing and splitting team, sharing what we do, letting others copy, etc.

6. Nov 2016
Jan 2018
Jan 2017
Mar 2017
May 2017
Jul 2017
Sep 2017
Nov 2017
Feb 2018
inception
work flow (iteration-0)
first showcase
team splits (2nd team)
introduced OKRs
own aws account
adv. infra automation
ops responsibility
team splits (3rd team)
internal beta
public beta
on-call rotation
black friday
team splits (platform team)
20 - 40% live traffic
5% - 20% live traffic
100% live traffic
scaling siroop: people managers
team handbook
CD walking skeleton (iteration-0)
team grows
adv. monitoring & analytics
Key Events
work flow (iteration-0)

7. Flow of Work
In
Analysis
In
Dev
In
QA
Live
Signed
Off
Prioritised
Backlog
pull
next most
important
showcase
managed by
product owner
features
experiments
tech tasks
managed by
tech lead
possibly
estimated at
high-level
more
conversations,
reviews, etc.
exploratory
build, test,
deploy, automate,
refactor, evolve
architecture, etc.
time

8. Nov 2016
Jan 2018
Jan 2017
Mar 2017
May 2017
Jul 2017
Sep 2017
Nov 2017
Feb 2018
inception
work flow (iteration-0)
first showcase
team splits (2nd team)
introduced OKRs
own aws account
adv. infra automation
ops responsibility
team splits (3rd team)
internal beta
public beta
on-call rotation
black friday
team splits (platform team)
20 - 40% live traffic
5% - 20% live traffic
100% live traffic
scaling siroop: people managers
team handbook
CD walking skeleton (iteration-0)
team grows
adv. monitoring & analytics
Key Events
CD walking skeleton (iteration-0)

9. Deployment Pipelines
Build Test Pack. DEV STAG PROD
commit to
master
store
artifact
triggers
integrate,
validate,
compile,
etc.
smoke tests,
exploratory tests
automatic
deployment
CI Integrated Environments
! !!
continuously
monitored
unit,
integration,
CDCs,
functional
time (< 15 mins)

11. Nov 2016
Jan 2018
Jan 2017
Mar 2017
May 2017
Jul 2017
Sep 2017
Nov 2017
Feb 2018
inception
work flow (iteration-0)
first showcase
team splits (2nd team)
introduced OKRs
own aws account
adv. infra automation
ops responsibility
team splits (3rd team)
internal beta
public beta
on-call rotation
black friday
team splits (platform team)
20 - 40% live traffic
5% - 20% live traffic
100% live traffic
scaling siroop: people managers
team handbook
CD walking skeleton (iteration-0)
team grows
adv. monitoring & analytics
Key Events
team handbook
team grows
team splits(2nd team)

12. Culture & Organisation
How we work
• Values
e.g. agile, lean, xp, DevOps, etc.
• Roles
e.g. tech lead, product manager, SE, etc.
• Flow of work
e.g. story maps, prioritised queue, kanban board, etc.
• Rituals
e.g. standups, retros, code reviews, OKR checkins, etc.
• Practices and patterns
e.g. CD, automation, testing strategy, clean code, etc.
• etc.
We wrote this stuff down in a handbook

13. Nov 2016
Jan 2018
Jan 2017
Mar 2017
May 2017
Jul 2017
Sep 2017
Nov 2017
Feb 2018
inception
work flow (iteration-0)
first showcase
team splits (2nd team)
introduced OKRs
own aws account
adv. infra automation
ops responsibility
team splits (3rd team)
internal beta
public beta
on-call rotation
black friday
team splits (platform team)
20 - 40% live traffic
5% - 20% live traffic
100% live traffic
scaling siroop: people managers
team handbook
CD walking skeleton (iteration-0)
team grows
adv. monitoring & analytics
Key Events
own aws account
adv. infra automation
ops responsibility
adv. monitoring & analytics
on-call rotation

14. Monitoring & Analytics
• Metrics & graphs
Across entire cattle farm
• Monitoring & alerting
#on-call
• Distributed tracing
#micro-services
• Automated error reporting
Client- and server-side
• Aggregated logging

15. Infrastructure Automation
The promised land! 🌈🦄
• Cloud-native
Entirely run on AWS (Frankfurt)
• Entire infrastructure defined as code #docker #terraform
❤ single source of truth - accessible to everyone
❤ almost no divergence or code duplication between integrated environments
❤ changes are rolled out safely and reliably via deployment pipeline
• Immutable and no need for config management tools
At a technical level, we don’t distinguish between a firewall change and a service deployment - it’s simply an infra change
• We treat the data center as one (large) computer #docker #ecs
❤ more resilience ❤ zero-downtime deployments ❤ better resource utilisation
$ terraform plan
-var-file=‘prod/shop.tfvars’
-var ‘shop_version=15b2296f’
$ terraform apply
module "shop" {
source = "modules/service"
name = "shop"
image = “siroop/shop”
version = “${var.shop_version}"
...

16. So… where are we today?
&

17. siroop Tech early 2018
siroop
Deployment frequency
Lead time for changes
Mean time to recover (MTTR)
Change failure rate < 1%
< 15 min
< 30 min
> 120 per day
(to prod)
see also: State of DevOps Report 2017

18. siroop Tech early 2018
Lambda
DynamoDB
ECS Kinesis

19. siroop Tech early 2018
culture
• agile / xp / lean / DevOps
• x-functional, autonomous dev teams
• OKRs
• pair programming
• clean code
• code reviews
• retrospectives
• showcases
• on-call handled by dev teams
• evolutionary architecture
• ADRs
• decision logs
• community of practices
• hybrid organisation
• people managers + tech leads
• career ladders
• strict hiring process
• hackdays
continuous delivery
• trunk based development
• high levels of automation
• continuous integration
• deployment pipelines
• short lead times
• independent, on-demand deployments
• loosely coupled architecture
• exhaustive testing strategies
• consumer driven contracts
• resilience testing (chaos monkey)
• continuous, zero-downtime deployments
platform
• cloud-native
• self-service platform
• containers or functions
• infrastructure as code
• immutable infrastructure
• modern cluster management
• modern monitoring & analytics
• etc.

20. Take Aways
• Start small and grow organically
• Focus on culture and technical excellence
• Inspect and adapt

21. Interested in joining us? 😉
https://jobs.siroop.ch
🏁