Infrastructure breaks companies
If you’re at a company that’s growing in any influential role, you need to understand what infrastructure to invest in: 1. Code repositories 2. Build and deploy tools 3. Runtime infrastructure 4. Dev, test tooling Many companies wait too long and that slows down product dev. Let’s trade infra stories so we can learn. At AWS I worked on a service that allowed each developer to run a copy of the entire service in their dev account, that was some of the best dev tooling I’ve seen. I could make changes and run things end to end without worrying about getting things into QA, etc TC: 620k Staff Eng
Ewww marketing. If you want people to look at your service, do the right thing and pay us to
Can you elaborate?
Robust tooling for flag management / experiments / dark launches / blue green deployments etc was the big winner for me at past FAANGs.
Azure Core is at this stage. 1+ hour long builds, deployments that take months, tests that take multiple hours to run, etc. I will never work there again unless they fix that shit
"They": I'm curious, couldn't you have helped fix the problem if it impacted you so much?
This is a systemic problem at Microsoft. No universal build system, no mono repo/package manager, no core libraries likely due to the former (yes, multiple teams implement their own multipaxos/raft for example), no experimentation libraries/services, etc. Every team rolls their own half-baked shitty solution. No single engineer can fix this
I've seen a very similar successful example at Netflix infra: "replicate the whole thing end to end for each dev". Makes devs super productive.