This blog and a few upcoming ones in this series will talk about our Devops journey and the lessons we learnt while scaling up in a short span of time.
 
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pCloudy’s DevOps Journey

We at pCloudy have been serving your mobile testing needs for 3 years now. And these years have been a wonderful roller-coaster of experiences, ranging from successes, achievements, near misses, not so near misses, crazy deadlines, demanding customers and above all lots and lots of learning.

We have had numerous challenges at various stages of our journey. Each phase of our journey came with specific sets of challenges and each time we surmounted those challenges, there were many insights, lessons and some time even ah-ha moments. But each of these learning howsoever small have in a way contributed to what we are right now. It has made sure that he product is stronger than ever before and growing faster than ever before.

And this learning is what we feel is very important. After all it has molded us in many ways. And we feel that this set of experiences will benefit others who may want to down the path that we took. This blog is an attempt to do exactly that, specifically with the DevOps part of our journey. I, Prashanth Nair, heading the tech department at pCloudy, will try to give you our perspective on the challenges we faced while building a robust DevOps. And overall this blog is an attempt to give you a ring side view of our thought process behind our DevOps decisions.

This post and a few subsequent ones in this series will talk about specific aspects of DevOps and our experiences with them. Here are a few of the items that we plan to talk about. I will be updating this page with links for those items as and when they are ready. There might be others coming up, keep watching this space for more info. If you have and experience.

Git Insight: an ode to branches

For any software development team, a source control is paramount. This post chronicles our scaling journey from a small team that used a simple strategy to the present system where close to 30 developers can work together simultaneously and do not step on each other’s metaphorical toes. It also details the branching policy we setup and how we created our testing and DevOps around the new branching model. Read More

Lessons from the Daily Scrum

Sir Winston Churchill once said “Plans are nothing, planning is everything”. In the context of a Sprint, what it means is that your team should have a plan to refer to, even if the original plan, the one agreed upon during the Sprint planning no longer is valid. You should constantly keep planning so that, you can react to changes in your present set of conditions that you are working with. How do you reconcile scrum with unplanned eventualities? How do you make sure your goals are still met? How do you ensure that your team is focused on completing the goals even when there are changes in your plan. And how to make sure your plan stays unchanged. This post gives you a look into why and how we pivot, how and why we decide not to. How do we course correct on a daily basis ? And finally how we have our daily Scrum and how it has changed over the years. Read More

Bureaucracy and other unlikely roots of a fledgling DevOps

Most DevOps patterns are exhaustive and would need some strong commitments, in terms of both time and effort. This usually is also the reason that people hesitate to introduce DevOps to their teams. Because there usually is a lot of change required in your way of working and the way your workflow flows when you try to retrofit a DevOps into your setup. More so if you did so without thinking hard about the consequences. So how did we create a continuous system of delivery? How did we make a system that is robust yet flexible enough to incorporate the needed changes ? Read More

Dealing with howlers and perfectionism. Code review for Dummies

Everybody does code review. But does it actually work ? How did we ensure that our code and our blood pressure stay in top shape, while at the same time maintain a feature turnaround time that allows neither. What were the lessons we learnt ? How much code review is too lenient ? how much is too strict? How do we deal with tech debt ? This blog post will delve into the our style and nuances of code review and also look at the specific problems we faced and how we resolved them. Read More

General purpose tools and how they helped us

This is more of a philosophical rant about the inherent urge that many software engineers have about reinventing the wheel, and how that prevents us from using really good tools that are available in the market causing productivity to suffer. I will give examples of how with the right tools we have managed to speed things up or made things less error prone or less boring or more automated. With each example I will show you how we became more productive with each class of tools and made work that much less difficult. Stay tuned for this upcoming blog in this series.

Let us know about your DevOps journey and how did it help you scale up in the comments section.