Lessons to Learn from Etsy’s DevOps Strategy

Every organization adopting DevOps has stories to tell to the world. Some of them turned out to be success stories, while others are more like lessons to learn. While it's true that Etsy is one of such organizations that benefited a lot from their DevOps adoption, they also learned a few lessons from their mistakes during their journey. Today, we will be talking in brief about those lessons in detail. But first, let’s try to understand why Etsy first became interested in DevOps.

Why Did Etsy Adopt DevOps?

Back in 2005, Etsy’s engineering teams were siloed into developers, operations teams, and database admins. Although the team was relatively small — close to 35 employees — they faced many team collaboration challenges. This barrier was hindering Etsy’s progress as an organization. 

In 2008, Etsy’s engineers realized the cons of monolithic architecture and the waterfall business model: 

• Frequent file changes

• Deployment inconsistency

• Lack of confidence in deployment

• Increased deployment time

• Less flexibility to experiment and iterate

Following this, they felt the need to change their software development approach. Interestingly, DevOps came into existence just about then. In 2010, a pioneer of the DevOps movement, John Willis, said, “If you do not have a DevOps culture, a culture to support your DevOps adoption, all automation efforts will be fruitless.” 

Etsy focused on making a cultural shift towards DevOps where their teams could collaborate and synchronize all their tasks in real time. It was the early vision and inclination towards the change that helped Etsy survive a massive DevOps culture shift. 

As one of the earliest adopters of DevOps, Etsy’s road to success was a bumpy ride. Let’s discuss some of the lessons that Etsy learned during its DevOps journey. 

Lessons to Learn from Etsy’s DevOps Strategy

1. Changing business culture is not a smooth process. You need to deal with stakeholders at different levels who might have a different opinion about this altogether. The whole process might involve demonstrating the positive aspects of the cultural shift. 

2. Have an honest assessment of where your codebase and team are relative to the deployments and how you want them to proceed towards deployment. 

3. This might come as a surprise, but take the initial steps as slowly as possible. Concentrate on preparing small chunks of code. Being slow and able to iterate is the way to move ahead.

4. Focus on the quality of the code instead of the stability of the deployment platform. You can address the above goal by deploying smaller chunks of code more often. Having smaller chunks to deploy makes it easier to verify code quality.

5. Leverage automation to its full potential. Automation grants you greater accuracy, reliability, consistency, and speed. 

6. Try to evaluate your business and deployment process via visualizations. It will help you in making informed business decisions. 

7. Focus on reinforcing value-based learning and collaboration between teams to bring cultural and transformational changes within the organization. 

Conclusion

DevOps is a cultural tool that holds tremendous potential to transform your organization. However, like any tool, it can harm you too — if not handled properly. Luckily, we have lots and lots of case studies of many organizations' past encounters with DevOps. These lessons can act as warning signs to prevent you from making the same mistakes in your organization. This article narrows down a few of the lessons that Etsy learned during its early days of DevOps adoption, although there are many more. Did you find any new lessons worth sharing? Let us know in the comments below.