How many of you have a software monolith in your organizations with a collection of satellite microservices orbiting? The future is here, just not evenly distributed. I evangelized devops transformation at Itron. I expected it would take five years for devops to take hold. When I came to New Relic, I got to skip those five years of work. Now I get to also compare notes directly with folks at Netflix, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft; indirectly with Google and Twitter. (Almost) all software is heading in this direction.
In many ways, New Relic is ahead of the game, especially compared with organizations with similar numbers of programmers.
We have around 60 teams running several hundreds of microservices orbiting our original Rails monolith. Teams range in size from 5 to 15 engineers. Everyone rotates through pager duty. The code is always changing. The network is always changing. Personnel are always changing. Teams grow and split. Services change custody. We're constantly adding more disk space and CPU, RAM and network capacity.
We have an extraordinary amount of automation. And we're New Relic... almost everything is instrumented and highly observable. I have some bad news for y'all from the future.
# Automation doesn't make the work any easier to do or understand.
There is no place where automation ends up putting humans out of work. If anything we need more humans with deeper technical skills in order to understand what is happening in our distributed system right now.