From starting in a garage 22 years ago, realestate.com.au has now grown to an ASX 200 company homed in 8 different countries. Join us in the journey of how we created a culture of ownership in this fast-paced digital environment. Ownership has been a key enabler that today allows 60+ engineering teams to build and operate more than 1000 systems in 6 different AWS regions. We’ll share how we’ve evolved from a siloed operations team to multiple on-call cross-functional teams and then how we expanded ownership beyond IT. This story will not only include the cultural changes but also the technology and tools that have helped us along the way: alerting as code, map-style visualization for our software architecture, chatops , etc. Talk presented at the 2019 Sydney AWS Summit.

1. Scaling the culture of
ownership
AWS Summit Sydney 2019

2. About us:
@setoide
Javier Turegano Aaron Wigley
@wigsofoz

3. REA Group is a digital media business specialised in property

4. It’s considerably big
Hundreds of people!
Thousands of systems!
Millions of visitors

6. Lots of data on a single page
Agent data
School data Sales data
Images and
floorplans
Location data
Segmentation
data
Enquiry data
Personal
data Recommendations
Market data
Listing data
Mortgage rates
Investment data
Ad-tech data
Analytics and
behavioural data

7. AT THE BEGINNING
How was it?

8. As in any good internet story,
all started in a garage…

9. Melisandre
SiteOPs
Manager
The night is dark, and full of… incidents.

12. Days with a full night sleep in a week:
0
A FEW YEARS BACK
For all REA systems
3
PRIMARY
ESCALATION
Sys
Sys

13. If only there was someone around...

14. HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED?
Within IT

15. • Exchange of crafts
• Shared ownership
• Optimise value delivered
• Operating sustainable services
Devops to the rescue

17. … You pay for it
– Katerina Martianova (REA)

19. Product Systems
Dev
Lead Dev
DevDelivery Lead

20. Lead Dev
Architect
Systems
Tech Writer
Product
Dev

21. Scaling on call: from 10 ops to 100 devs
https://rea.to/scaling By Tom Partington

22. Incident Response Training

23. The Tools and Tech Stack

25. Treasure Map

26. Alerting as code
From ClickOps to:

27. Alerting as code

28. Alerting as code

29. Slack integration – Ops Bot

30. HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED?
Beyond IT

31. ENGINEER EMBEDDED IN THE CALL CENTRE

32. Non Tech People on Pager Duty

33. Non Tech People on Pager Duty

34. Days with a full night sleep in a week:
0
A FEW YEARS BACK
For all REA systems
3
PRIMARY
ESCALATION
Sys
Sys

35. Days with a full night sleep this week:
7
NOW
7 6 7 6 7
7 7 6 7 7 7
PRIMARY
ESCALATION
Team A Team B Team C Team D Team E Team F
SysDev Dev Dev Dev Sys
SysSysSysSysDevDev

36. PagerDuty – REA video

37. Thank you.
Chat to us in PagerDuty’s booth
later today
Join us - www.rea-group.com/careers/