Enabling Engineering Productivity at the Financial Times

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Enabling Engineering Productivity at the Financial Times Sarah Wells Technical Director for Engineering Enablement @sarahjwells

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Enabling Engineering Productivity at the Financial Times Sarah Wells Technical Director for Engineering Enablement @sarahjwells

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Changes to production at the FT

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It’s only an experiment if it can fail “Experiments: the Good, the Bad and the Beautiful” by Linda Rising

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• Delivery lead time • Deployment frequency • Change fail rate • Time to restore service

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“Full stack” stops somewhere!

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Enter Engineering Enablement Our aim is to standardise, simplify and advise, supporting the FT's product development teams so that they can deliver value quickly, securely and scalably.

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In Team Topologies terms, we are platform and enabling teams

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Pave the road Guardrails not fences

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A cautionary tale…

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FT Platform impact on server provisioning time

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You needed sudo access to deploy code for the first time to a newly provisioned server

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Autonomous teams can choose something else http:/ /matt.chadburn.co.uk/notes/teams-as- services.html

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Teams chose other options: • Heroku • Containers

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Internal teams are service providers now

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Guardrails not fences

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People shouldn’t need to read the guardrails

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You need to do this to spin up AWS resources

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Evolving the guardrails

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Our Tech Governance Group

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Pave the road

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The golden path: An opinionated and supported way of doing things

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“Supported”

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Principles for building the golden path

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Valuable Has obvious value to engineers Should we provide this capability?

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Make sure someone is signed up to use the thing you are building

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Owned and supported It won’t disappear under people Transparent usage and cost insights It’s clear who is using it and how much their bill would be Can people rely on it?

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Discoverable Engineers can find out it exists Documented Step by step guides, explainers, reference docs all exist Self service You can solve your problem yourself Can people use this without costly co-ordination?

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The Tech Hub

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“Lots of manual PR approvals, which delays time to release. E.g. approvals for DNS repo”

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Only added lines Only removed lines Modified but line count the same 220 (47%) 71 (15%) 141 (30%) 117 (25%) approved without any comments

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• Automatically approve simple stuff • Send DMARC/DKIM/MX changes to Cyber Security team for approval • Check for common mistakes • Look for modifications that are benign and auto- approve • Use biz-ops to find a suitable team member that can peer review

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Easy to use Documentation guides new users - an ‘on- ramp’ Consistent developer experience If you’ve used other capabilities, this should be recognisably similar Will people get stuck?

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Independent yet composable You can use it on its own or combine it with other capabilities Automation friendly APIs, SDKs, CLIs Can people use it in ways we didn’t expect?

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Safe to use Sensible defaults, small blast radius Secure and compliant Security issues are fixed for you, capabilities comply with our policies Reliable Suitable levels of availability, scalability and performance Does it guide people to do the right thing?

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The Biz Ops graph

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Runbooks are extracted to S3

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Valuable Owned and supported Transparent usage and cost insights Discoverable Documented Self service Easy to use Consistent developer experience Independent yet composable Automation friendly Safe to use Secure and compliant Reliable

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Charity Majors: https:/ /charity.wtf/ 2018/12/02/software-sprawl-the-golden- path-and-scaling-teams-with-agency/ Galo Navarro: https:/ /srvaroa.github.io/paas/ infrastructure/platform/kubernetes/cloud/ 2020/01/02/talk-how-to-build-a-paas- for-1500-engineers.html https:/ /backstage.io/

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Thank you @sarahjwells