Resources

At OpsLevel we believe Service Ownership is the future of DevOps. We believe this subtle, but important, shift can bring tons of benefits to engineering teams: autonomy, speed, resiliency, and accountability. We build new features in OpsLevel with these characteristics in mind; that’s why we’ve recently launched automatically personalized dashboards for all OpsLevel users.

Enabling Service Ownership is our north star at OpsLevel. We believe that true service ownership is the future of DevOps and a key to building agile, efficient engineering teams. As a part of making service ownership a reality, we’ve recognized that teams own services, not people. But of course, when you need to get something done urgently, you want to talk to a person, not a team. That’s why OpsLevel now supports tracking functional team membership alongside core service metadata.

Distributed microservice architectures are increasingly common today as engineering teams seek to scale both their applications and headcount. But for all the advantages of microservices, they’re not without tradeoffs. One area of concern is the web of dependencies that’s naturally created as more microservices are built and deployed.

More software, more problems? Software is eating the world and that means more people and teams are developing software. To stay current and competitive, modern organizations are scaling their software engineering teams.

The term “DevOps” entered the IT industry in 2009 with the first DevOpsDays event held in Ghent, Belgium. But the world is constantly changing. Since 2009, the IT space has shifted dramatically. Containers, microservices, and “serverless” computing have all taken the world by storm in the last decade. The term “DevOps” has also undergone a sort of transformation, though OpsLevel is bringing it back to its roots of Service Ownership.

How we started: thumbnails with smartcropper. In the very early days of OpsLevel, our marketing website was powered by WordPress. Even though our site then was small, WordPress was a pretty big moving part that required more maintenance than it was worth. We found ourselves spending time on upgrading both WordPress and its plugins, debugging when things broke, and managing performance. We also found that drafts were not a great workflow for previewing or staging changes as the live production site wouldn’t always look the same as a draft edit.

Our software ecosystems grow more complex every year. With new frameworks, dependencies, and technologies to help automate or simplify every step of the development life cycle, keeping track of requirements that provide reliability and security can become difficult. And that’s why production readiness reviews and checklists help eliminate cognitive load. They let you focus more on features or potential failure points.

Kubernetes is great because of its almost limitless configurability. But this configurability makes it hard to ensure that best practices are followed consistently across your cluster.

Years ago, end-to-end software development involved dividing tasks based on where they fell in the system life cycle. One team wrote the code. Then another team deployed it to production. And yet another team monitored and maintained the service. This led to a lot of friction, needless handoffs, and bottlenecks.

Engineering initiatives are a necessity when it comes to ensuring security, reliability, and keeping the lights on within an organization. These can include actions such as upgrading library versions, migrating everyone to a new metrics provider, or upgrading a framework.

When starting a new job, have you ever asked yourself: How much time should I spend learning about the code? The product? The process? Was I expected to know Technology/Framework/Design Pattern X?Is my ticket taking too long?

You can use OpsLevel’s Git Integrations to run code-level checks against your services, to bring ownership to your repos, and more. While the best way of integrating your repositories with OpsLevel is importing everything, we realize however that some repositories are more important than others. (cough 6-month-old hackday project cough.) Oftentimes these repositories aren’t ready to be archived or deleted, but also don’t need the full OpsLevel experience. Wouldn’t it benice if they almost didn’t exist at all in OpsLevel?

Let’s get DevOps to mean Service Ownership again. We broke DevOps. And it’s preventing us from building. When the first cloud providers emerged in the mid-2000s, they unlocked a new superpower: the ability to near-instantly provision hardware. Service-oriented architecture and microservices developed as a new architectural pattern. As a result, DevOps emerged as a practice to organize engineering teams around those new services - combining development and operations responsibilities onto the same team.

Having strong ownership of your microservices and other running systems is an important pre-requisite to building a DevOps culture. But focusing solely on ownership of services running in production can leave some gaps. There’s a lot of code living outside of any service’s codebase: libraries, internal tools, templates, terraform code, and a lot more. All of these repositories need ownership too.

Over the last few months at OpsLevel, we’ve changed how we tell interview candidates we’re not moving forward. Instead of a templated response, we now provide specific and actionable feedback for each candidate about where they fell short in our interview process and how they can improve. The results have been spectacular.

OpsLevel contains a ton of information about your technical services and systems, but it doesn’t contain all of the information about your business. Fortunately the data in OpsLevel isn’t trapped there! In addition to our existing GraphQL API, we now support extracting all of your OpsLevel data into your ETL pipeline and data warehouse.

We all know that naming things is one of the two hardest problems in computer science (along with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.) Naming your microservices is extra hard, as they’re almost like children: they’re practically these living, breathing things that you birth into the world and do your best to make sure they’re set up for success in life (i.e. in production.) Ok, perhaps people don’t agonize over the names of their microservices as much as the names of their children, but it’s still a big enough decision.

Last summer, our team gathered in the woodland heart of Parry Sound, Ontario for the inaugural OpsLevel HackDay. For 24 hours, participants were given total creative freedom while being tasked with creating a demo-able, team-based project. Skills were sharpened, bonds were strengthened, and marshmallows were roasted - it was a blast.