A presentation for the Automation session at the 2014 Cyber Summit by Subbu Allamaraju, Chief Engineer of Cloud at eBay Inc.

1. 2012 2014
A dev/test cloud
Less than a rack of compute
Handcrafted by an engineer
Supported by another engineer
Zero automation
Dev to op ratio = 1:0
Thousands of nodes
Distributed across several AZs
Automated
Operated 24x7
Running the business
Dev to op ratio: 5:1

2. 1 2 3 4

3. 1 2 3 4
Treat infrastructure as code

4. 1. Fully automate deployments
o Well known principle
2. Treat automation artifacts like you treat code
o Source control → code reviews → tests →
deployment
3. Take automation as a product feature
o Road map, sprints, bugs, backlog, releases
4. Measure outcomes with KPIs
o Time to deploy, time to recover, time to rollout a
change

5. 1 2 3 4
Manage drift

6. System is in a state other than the
desired state!
- Incidents waiting to happen
- Impacts time to recover
- Impacts customers

7. Drift
Automation
Gaps
Habits
Transitional
Debugging
Incidents

8. Accept that drift happens - and manage
drift mitigation
1. Automated audits
2. Drift tracking
3. Mitigation as a planned routine activity
4. Culture - reward right habits

9. 1 2 3 4
Awareness of systems and
operations

10. Measure
everything
Business
KPIs
Config
management
Alerts
Another product
Drift
feature!

11. 1 2 3 4
Culture of shared accountability

12. Ops Dev
Working on what’s
running the business
Working on (wants to
work on) new things
Knows how the
system fails
Knows how the system
is supposed to work
Worries about TTR Wants to understand why
Make TTR a shared goal!

13. Operations is Engineering

14. Thanks