DevOps - Nothing Stays the Same

@mmaibaum
DevOps - Nothing Stays The Same
Michael Maibaum

@mmaibaum
Precis
Sky Betting & Gaming has become one of the largest online operators in the UK, undergoing a period of sustained high growth in customer
numbers, transaction rate, staff size, and number of systems. Five years ago, the company established its first DevOps team, and since then,
DevOps has become a major part of the way Sky Betting & Gaming does things. However, what that means keeps changing. Michael Maibaum
describes how the DevOps function has changed repeatedly over the last few years to help the company continue to move fast and keep systems
operating through organizational and technical challenges.

Originally, the DevOps team was established as a group of like-minded engineers keen to smooth the delivery of software into operations and make
it run better. As the business grew, the engineering teams were split and the accumulated DevOps knowledge distributed into those new groups,
but the team soon found out that things didn’t fit into a distributed function and features of the platform that need ownership. As a result, platform
teams were formed to produce products that other teams use. Sky Betting & Gaming’s DevOps experts now come in two categories: those that
directly work in or with individual (product) engineering teams and those that deliver a platform that makes life easier for the rest of the engineering
function.

It is easy to see a narrow definition of DevOps as part of the function of a specific engineering team. However, in the experience of Sky Betting &
Gaming, to achieve a truly effective delivery and operational culture (and indeed, DevOps) once you have hundreds of engineers requires
investment in the platform as a product in and of itself.

Michael outlines the history of DevOps at Sky Betting & Gaming and explains how the company has taken its DevOps philosophy into its vendors
as it takes its first steps into the cloud.

@mmaibaum
Introducing Sky Betting & Gaming
• One of the top 3 online gambling
operators in the UK
• 3 Categories of product
• Sportsbook
• Free Sports related content
• Gaming

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A Diverse Technology Stack

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A Story of Change & Growth
2010 2015
£50M
£350M
• Business grew slowly for the first 8
years post-acquisition
• Interactive tv was seen as the next big
thing
• Major growth period starts in ~2008

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Infrastructure & Ops Only
• Tech Team
• No in-house development
• Hosting and operating third party vendors applications
• Waterfall project management and delivery

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Focus on the Web
• Increased focus on the web, but still delivered by third party vendor software teams
• Starting to deliver real customer & revenue growth at this point, company profits
start to grow.

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The End of the Beginning
• Business wanted to increase velocity
• More frequent change
• Cheaper to deliver new features
• More control
• Time to bring the user experience in-house

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The First Problem
How to improve delivery & reliability from the in-house software teams?
Vendor
Ops
Dev

Backlog Wip Done Test Live
Delivery Team 1
Infrastructure
Service Desk
1st Line On Call
The First Answer - 2011
DevOps Team
2nd Line On Call

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DevOps
• Build tooling focussed on developer productivity and system reliability
• First CI pipelines with Jenkins
• Load testing, capacity and scaling (large, peaky events)

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Typical Saturday (Bets & Logins)

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Centralised DevOps?
• Probably not want what you want to aspire to
• But… Can be a good way to start
• Start the cultural shift
• Solve the problem of not enough ‘DevOps’ to go around

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DevOps Starting to Work
• Fit in well with increasing emphasis of agile delivery (Scrum, then Kanban)
• Central team provided a concentration of capability and culture
• Demonstrable wins important for adoption
• In-House Dev going well enough that we start work on Sky Vegas ‘in-house’
front end

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Commits/MonthCommits/Release

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March 2012
We go from 'does anyone think we
will be using the in-house site for
Grand National?' to 'does anyone
think we *won't* be using the in-
house site?'

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Soon we had another problem…
How do we manage configuration for Disaster Recovery?

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Config Management
ConfigureServer - Many custom perl scripts
Revision control via
something.pl.freds-test
something.pl.bak, something.pl.bak2, something.pl.old,
something.pl.not-sure-what-this-is-but-scared-to-delete-it

@mmaibaum
Platform Evolution
• Another Centralised Team
• This time born out of infrastructure and the DevOps team
• Created with a specific purpose (fix config management for DR, aka Chef
All the Things)
• This turned out to be hard - At least 1.5 years effort
• Lots of concurrent change, with little effective standardisation

Publish
Applications
Infrastructure
Code
(Chef, Ruby,
ServerSpec)
Publish
Application
Code
(PHP, NodeJS, React,
Java)
Release
Configuration
Orchestration

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The Beginning of the Middle
The birth of tribes

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DevOps was in danger of becoming Ops
• With teams growing and changing the ways they work, a centralised
devops team increasingly mis-aligned.
• DevOps engineers were spread out around different teams

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Tribes
• Inspired by the Spotify white
paper
• Overall team getting too big
• Sub-divide into autonomous
teams first at main product level
(tribes, e.g. bet/gaming) then
squads within those.

Core Tribe
Gaming Tribe
Infra Tribe
Bet Tribe
Growing Pains - 2013
Backlog Wip Done Test Live Backlog Wip Done Test Live
Web Experience Place & Track Squad
Platform Ops
Service Desk
1st Line On Call
Casino Squad Vegas Squad
Platform Evo Account Squad
Backlog Wip Done Test Live
Infra Squad
SLM
Security

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Better…
• Alignment with development
• Ownership of Ops issues in squads
• Knowledge of services each ‘DevOp’ was working with

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But…
• The ‘DevOps’ were still the first on-call, cross tribe
• Increasingly limited knowledge of other teams services
• Team size awkward,
• too many services for individuals to know all services,
• not big enough to populate on-call with the right Ops skills

Publish
Applications
Infrastructure
Code
(Chef, Ruby,
ServerSpec)
Publish
Application
Code
Java)
Release
Configuration
Orchestration
Integration/Test/Production

Dev Ops
Publish
Applications
Infrastructure
Code
(Chef, Ruby,
ServerSpec)
Publish
Application
Code
Java)
Release
Configuration
Orchestration
Integration/Test

@mmaibaum
The Middle
of the Middle
aka 2014

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Tribes have local focus
• Optimising for local concerns
• Delivery of that product
• Improvement of their technology stack
• Improving their processes
• Local service delivery teams
• Bet WebOps team (monitoring and so on)
• Bet SRE team
• Bet Delivery Engineering

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Squads taking ownership…
• End to end ownership
• Design, Build, Run, Change, Fix, Retire
• Full support in a team - on call
• There are specialists, but they aren’t the only people that can do
things

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But…
Should everything be a local concern?

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Cross Cutting Platform Features
• What happened to Platform Evolution?…. It evolved into Platform Services
• There is a wider set of ‘PaaS’ like services that would be useful across the business
• Counterbalance ‘everything local’ inefficiencies
• What
• PlatCI - Our CI as a service platform (Jenkins etc),
• Shared Kafka - Messaging Platform as a Service
• Self Contained Projects - Get rid of the Dev/Ops tooling projects/tooling splits

Orchestration
Application + Config
Build
Jenkins
Publish
Cookbook (sbg_myapp)
• Infrastructure Code (Chef, Inspec, Custom Resources)
• Application Code (PHP, NodeJS, Java)
• CI Pipeline (Jenkins Pipeline, Chef)
• Integration Tests (Kitchen, Chef)

pscli
The ‘Glue’ - enables the consistent composition of toolsets in different environments
• Internal Tool
• Written in Go
• Pulls in various ‘tools’ Docker images
• Executes tools in containers, e.g.
• ChefDK
• Terraform
• Packer
• AWS Authentication
• Hashicorp Vault
• Code Generation

pscli generate cookbook myapp
Git
--volumes-from
/git
/opt/chefdk
ChefDK
--volumes-from
Docker Registry
Code Generator
--volumes-from
/generator
{command runner} ~/workspace/myapp

pscli kitchen converge
Git
--volumes-from
/git
{command runner}
Kitchen Suite A
Kitchen Suite B
/opt/chefdk
ChefDK
--volumes-from
Docker Registry

pscli terraform apply
/opt/terraform
Terraform
--volumes-from
Docker Registry
{command runner}

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Vendors
• Bad vendor relationships can cripple progress
• Or they can enable it
• It is in your interest to help them as much as you can

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Delivery Partners
• Bad vendor relationships can cripple progress
• Or they can enable it
• It is in your interest to help them as much as you can

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Tribes Getting Too Big
• Feeling the pain of growth again
• Bet Tribe bigger than whole tech organisation was 3 years earlier
• Break up of bet tribe into smaller, nested, tribes
• Making more specialist roles closer to each ‘product’ delivery squad (e.g.
SRE as part of a squad)

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Two kinds of ‘DevOps’
• People in every delivery team, some of these are DevOps specialists but the
whole team cares about the whole product lifecycle
• People in specialist teams working on shared platform capabilities
• Platform Services - Cross Tribe Services
• Platform Engineering (Big tribes have their own ‘shared’ services)
• Delivery Engineering (Specialists in tribes helping squads optimise
reliability & delivery, especially things like release engineering, CI, etc)

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Path Dependency
• It really matters where you are, and where you are coming from
• At least as much as where you’d like to go to.
• There isn’t a path, because there isn’t an environment (and it changes)

@mmaibaum
There is no End
Except of this talk
http://engineering.skybettingandgaming.com

DevOps - Nothing Stays the Same

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