When you start a startup, the situation is similar to a battlefield in many ways.Lots of chaos, no room for specialization. “Just do it” mentality.Everybody does everything.Adrenalyn rush can take you pretty far.Over time, the operations work got frustrating. We tried to figure out why.
Software engineers used to extreme amounts of leverage.Do X, 10X comes out, every day, forever.Write a line of code, deploy to slideshare, it touches a million users a day for the next 10 years.
In contrast, a lot of the operations work that we were doing in the beginning felt like manual labor.Install on one server.Install on 2nd serverUpgrade server 1 and 2Reinstall on server 2The fact that we had started in the beginning without ops people made us really sensitive to the parts of ops work that was not highly leveraged, that was more like manual labor. So once we started having specialization within the company, we looked hard for a system that would give the operations side more leverage.