Upgrade Your User (Create Lasting Value)
The true worth of your work is seen in the lives you transform, for when you help someone climb a mountain, you join them at the top.
In 2008, Netflix had a major database corruption.
(they were on on-premise systems back then)
And nearly one-third of their 8.4 million customers were affected because of that outage. So Netflix decided to migrate from on-premise to the cloud.
That’s a huge upgrade for both Netflix and their users.
Why and How?
Netflix moved from relational database to NoSQL db in the cloud. To support scaling. Their monolithic app became cloud based microservices app.
And the loosely coupled microservices made their teams to build and push changes individually. The app scaling is taken care by the distributed nature of systems.
If you notice closely, end to end automation, fast build pipelines & daily superfast software updates are all good. But the core delivery is the human transformation. The happy users.
And that’s how DevOps culture started its journey.
The Weight of Real Value
I started my career in 2009. In a 4 person startup.
Our office is right below a real, physical datacenter.
During the day time, i helped to create the software and shipped to production in the night. From laptop to production server, directly. Yes, no separate qa team, it was all me and my dear friend, Ashok.
Back then, software launches felt like sending rockets into space, you never know what is about to explode and when.
It was hard, it was crazy but it was fun.
The next day, things fail sometimes, and when things failed, it brought Thanos level chaos with it. Me and Ashok are the only 2 people left to save our world. Together, we used it fix things and ship to prod. Long gone are those days.
Fortunately, most of what we do today is relatively simple.
Thanks to the devops culture and the cloud.
But here's what that DevOps conversion taught me: the coolest things we created always empowered users and improved their life experience.
For example:
With Kubernetes, and the no downtime deployments are not just about minimizing downtime, its about enhancing our users trust. Same with the rollbacks. Very few people notice when the upgrade/rollback happened.
Another example:
By implementing Karpenter + KEDA for autoscaling, you're not just managing nodes scaling. You're upgrading your team's ability to sleep at night, knowing the systems can scale well allowing the app to breathe well even when there is huge traffic.
Isn’t this real value?
Btw, last week, I talked to someone who managed K8s at 10M+ req/sec scale, here’s the top k8s issue that comes at scale. More videos in the channel here.
continue reading…
The Gap Between Just supporting and Upgrading
Now, shifting back to talk where many teams get stuck.
Most of us operate in “light mode”.
Our focus is to ship fast, iterate faster, and measure everything except transformation. We are just supporting.
As engineers, we rapidly release features/pipelines without clear strategy, just to see what gains adoption. And just because a feature is used doesn’t mean it actually delivers meaningful value.
The real upgrade lies in giving the user new power and capability, rather than just extra buttons, in whichever functions you operate.
The bottom line:
No matter what you do, add crazy value. Give your absolute best for it. If you are a DevOps engineer,
Every pipeline you create should make someone’s life more peaceful.
Every automation script you create should save someone's precious time.
Every big problem you solve should bring enormous user confidence.
This isn’t just about being helpful, no, it’s much more.
The true worth of your work is seen in the lives you transform, for when you help someone climb a mountain, you join them at the top.
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Thank you once again.
Good read and inspiring 👏
A good read. Always fun to read the "works on my machine" transition success stories.