How Netflix sped up its DevOps approach to bring streaming video to the world

Josh Evans, the director of Operations Engineering at Netflix, had a problem. His engineers were hobbled by technical debt, stuck managing working with JAVA 6, deploying off a a Linux distribution that’s cadence didn’t jibe well with their release cycle, and generally facing what he called a “big gap in expectations.”

At a company known for moving quickly, DevOps had become laggard instead of a leader, and Evans knew things needed to change.

In a talk he gave at QCon in November, posted online a few days ago, Evans goes into how he helped get past the rut the Netflix DevOps team was in, while balancing feedback from some teams the new initiatives were overloading their resources — while at the same time other engineers felt like the team still was just playing catchup.

He broke is his approach down to five principles:

The talk is well worth a full watch if you’re part of a DevOps team looking to scale up to new challenges.