Case study: What the enterprise can learn from Etsy's DevOps strategy

Changing business culture

Fostering a business culture that is conducive to this more collaborative way of working is half the battle for most enterprises going down the DevOps route.

Etsy has managed to side-step some of these issues, particularly when it comes to getting senior management types to buy into the DevOps way of working, because it’s a change that has been led from the top since the beginning.

“The hardest part is getting the business culture right, particularly when trying to transplant these DevOps ideas into a larger company,” says Cowie.

“You may have to deal with stakeholders at different levels who may not like this idea of relinquishing some power or giving people access to systems they previously haven’t had.”

"The hardest part is getting the business culture right, particularly when trying to transplant these DevOps ideas into a larger company. You may have to deal with stakeholders at different levels who may not like this idea of relinquishing some power or giving people access to systems they previously haven’t had"

Jon Cowie, Etsy

But for enterprise IT departments looking to win the board’s approval for introducing a more DevOps-friendly way of working, Cowie advises them to focus on the business benefits it can provide, rather than getting too bogged down in tech talk.

“You have to be able to demonstrate to the larger business why it’s not just a buzzword and can add value to the business, and the only way to do that is to give them a concrete project and show them how it has positively affected the business,” he says.

“The people who make the decisions at the top of the pile may be more business-minded than technically so, and you need to speak their language and demonstrate the impact it has had on key performance indicators or revenue that quarter.

“You need to sell the idea to them in business terms because IT and development are service organisations that exist to fulfil the priorities of the business,” Cowie adds.

In Etsy’s case, as previously mentioned, the move has enabled it to roll out website and app updates with greater ease and fewer disruptions, which – in turn – has made it easier for the firm to act on user feedback.

“If there is a new feature we’re thinking of introducing on the site, rather than do it as a single deployment, we can turn on said feature for a certain percentage of the user traffic and see what the response is,” says Cowie.

“Also, if we push code out that causes an issue, because we deploy the site so rapidly, we can very quickly tell which deploy it was that caused the problem, which we couldn’t do so easily if we pushed out two weeks of changes in one go.”

Change the business from within

Etsy’s operations are underpinned by on-premise infrastructure housed in a datacentre, which may surprise some given how intrinsically linked DevOps seems to be with the use of cloud technologies.

The on-premise versus cloud debate is a bit of a non-starter, says Cowie, as the company is able to accurately predict how demand for its site’s services are likely to change throughout the year. As such, sticking with its on-premise infrastructure makes commercial sense.

The firm does, however, make use of Chef’s automation software at various stages of the software development cycle, right up until the point the next update is ready to deploy.

Cowie is keen to stress, though, that automation is used to augment the activities of the company’s DevOps team, rather than as a replacement for it.

“The things we use Chef for are the things that computers are designed to do well. For example, ensuring that on 1,000 servers you have the same configuration file,” he says.

“Computers can do that more accurately than humans, which frees up our team to do the things they do well, like designing a complex architecture.”

Some enterprises might be tempted to hire an IT consultancy or independent services supplier to advise them on DevOps best practice or sell them a “drop-in” system that will help them get up and running quickly, says Cowie, but this is an approach he advises against.

“They can give you automation and measurement tooling, and they can certainly help you with the technical side of DevOps, but the cultural part of making it work well is so particular to each company,” he says.

“An independent service company can’t come in and know your business better than you do, so I would caution people against doing that.”