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Is your devops infrastructure capable of deploying 50 times per day?

Hiren Dhaduk's photo
Hiren Dhaduk
·Mar 3, 2022·

3 min read

I've seen individuals react to the word "DevOps" in a variety of ways. Few people think of it as a symbol of faster deployments, while others are terrified by DevOps horror stories. When my company switched to DevOps, we had our fair share of reservations and concerns. Rather than focusing on the drawbacks, we chose to highlight the benefits of DevOps and the changes it brought to some of the firms.

Netflix, Walmart, Etsy, Target, Nordstrom, and others are just a few of the numerous businesses that have benefited from DevOps. Etsy's DevOps success story was our driving force for DevOps adoption. The organization was able to deploy around 50 times per day. Isn't it difficult to believe at first? Until we figured out how they accomplished it, we had the same reaction.

Etsy’s DevOps Strategy

Etsy increased the frequency of its deployments by making small but major improvements to its delivery, automation, and development processes. It began with a two-step procedure –

  • Etsy concentrated on stabilizing the website by employing a metric-based system to monitor it.
  • Developers now have access to the database, allowing them to troubleshoot issues.

Etsy's team quickly concluded that establishing a CI/CD pipeline was the most efficient and frictionless approach to deliver code. Etsy used continuous integration (CI) technologies to test code changes once they were merged, ensuring successful integrations. To make the procedure more efficient, they developed a number of in-house software solutions.

Try

This approach was devised by the Etsy team in 2011. It's an Etsy library for testing code changes in Jenkins without committing them to the main trunk. Try is in charge of maintaining the trunk clean so that developers can test their changes rapidly. This boosted their daily deployment pace to more than 20.

Deployinator

The goal was to design a one-button deployment solution that was simple and painless. Etsy came up with their own solution, the Deployinator, to address this. To push any update before Deployinator, the DevOps team needed three engineers, one operation engineer, and production engineers on standby. It only takes one person and about two minutes to push any updates using Etsy's in-house solution. Deployinator was released an open-source project by the corporation in 2015.

Princess

Etsy, too, has its own staging environment. Princess, as it's known, makes use of stored data, networks, and production resources, and it's hosted on a different server than Etsy.com. This allows the development team to test their live code without interfering with the website. When you're happy with the code, you can hit a button to make it live.

Conclusion

The DevOps narrative of Etsy demonstrates that every organisation confronts issues, and you must come up with creative solutions to deal with them. They made certain that their CI/CD pipeline ran smoothly at all times. I was pleased by how they simplified complex processes and created one-stop shopping solutions for them. Which step piqued your curiosity the most? Please let me know in the comments section below.