A guest lecture given at the University of St Andrews on how RightScale does software engineering.

1. Software Engineering
at RightScale
Ali Khajeh-Hosseini
@AliKhajeh
Oct 2014, University of St Andrews

2. I’m here to talk about
RightScale Cloud Analytics…
and how we build it

3. Jan 2009: Started researching cloud cost forecasting in St Andrews
Dec ‘11: With Hassan, we launched PlanForCloud
Jul ‘12: Acquired by RightScale
Nov ‘13: Launched Private-Beta of Cloud Analytics
Mar ‘14: Cloud Analytics goes into Public-Beta
Oct ‘14: Cloud Analytics is Generally Available
The story so far…

4. What the heck is…
a cloud?

5. Server

6. Rack

7. Container

8. Electricity, Water, Internet
2500
Servers

11. Taken from one of Dave Cliff’s talk on Cloud Computing

12. a cloud

13. Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Cloud Computing

14. Cloud Analytics helps users make decisions
Cloud Management helps users take actions

15. Cloud spending is growing rapidly
Cloud pricing is complicated…
we scrape over 12,000 prices
Need to monitor, forecast and optimize cloud spend
The challenge

16. Connect to a cloud
We regularly collect data

17. Slice and dice the data

18. See historic trends

19. Forecast costs based on
switching clouds or
increased growth

20. Who buys our products?
Enterprises like
Sony, EA Games, PBS,
Pearson Publishing, Zynga…

21. Our Scale
How many dev teams?
How many code repos?
How many instances?
How much VC funding?

22. RightScale Engineering
You’re shipping too late if you’re comfortable
with what you’re shipping

23. Engineering Roles
Product Manager: what should we build?
Engineering Manager: how should we build it?
Architects: design the systems
UX: design the user experience
Operations: deploy, scale and monitor systems
Escalations: something just broke, who can fix it?
Support/Docs: help customers use it
Engineers: work with everyone to build and test it

24. Dev Process: Scrum
2 week sprints
1 day planning
End of sprint demo
Release
Retro
2
weeks

25. Design
Wikipages
+Comments/discussions
It’smostlyinformal
No Word documents
No UML diagrams

26. Planning
Story:As a user
I want to export report as PDF
So that I can share it with others
• Refactor simulation engine to…
• Switch from Google charts to Highcharts
• Generate PDF in background queue
• …
• Write tests
• Code review
Engineers breakdown stories into tasks
Granularity: less than a day to complete

27. Estimation
Play planning poker

28. Sprint calculations
=================
Sprint
Summary
=================
Sprint
Begins:
02/06/2014
Sprint
Ends:
10/06/2014
Sprint
Dura=on:
9
days
Team:
John,
Joe,
Jeff,
Jack
Development:
Vaca=on:
0
days
Total
Capacity:
200
hours
-­‐-­‐
release
issues:
10
-­‐-­‐
priority
bugs:
30
-­‐-­‐
tech
debt:
50
-­‐-­‐
backlog:
110
Start sprinting…

29. Daily standup (9:30am sharp)
Answer:
1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What are going to do today?
3. Is anything blocking you?

30. Weekly release trains
Merge your feature
if it’s ready to ship
that week

31. Code reviews

32. Good tests
Positive tests
Negative tests
Fast tests

33. Continuous integration

34. Good test coverage

35. Exception handling

36. Issue tracking

37. Performance monitoring

38. Some

39. things

40. to

41. look

42.
for

43. when

44. looking

45. for

46.
internships

47. or

48. jobs

50. Do they have fun?
What’s their hiring process?
Do they invest in good tools?
What’s the team setup, and how often do they ship?
Are people given freedom to experiment? Friday afternoon
is our iTime
What’s the level of transparency and trust? Open by Default
What’s

51. important?

53. Edinburgh, Santa Barbara and remote…

54. RightScale

55. Employee

56. Meetup

57.
(a

58. week

59. of

60. fun

61. in

62. California)

65. What do hackers want? Like all craftsmen,
hackers like good tools. In fact, that's an
understatement. Good hackers find it
unbearable to use bad tools. They'll simply
refuse to work on projects with the wrong
infrastructure.
Paul Graham on Great Hackers

66. Dev tools
Invest

67. in

68. good

69. tools

71. Invest

72. in

73. design

75. eng.rightscale.com
Invest

76. in

77. open

78. source

80. Invest

81. in

82. automation

83.
Meet

84. Leeroy:

85. our

86. bot

88. Ruby, Praxis (our own open source API framework), Go,
Erlang, JavaScript, AngularJS, Node.
MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB,
Redshift, Memcached, Redis, Nginx, HAProxy, Rsyslog.
AWS, Google Compute Engine, MS Azure, VMware…
Use

89. a

90. variety

91. of

92. tech

94. RightScale.com/jobs