Continuous Deployment

at Etsy
March 10, 2012
SXSW

Chad Dickerson, CEO

chad@etsy.com / @chaddickerson
 By the numbers

1.4B page views per month

$525MM sales on Etsy in 2011
39MM unique visitors / month
800K shops / 150 countries
100+ engineers
The Etsy Way
http://etsy.me/etsyway
Our simple definition of
continuous deployment:
Small, frequent changes
to production.
Continuous deployment
transformed Etsy
 Timeline

First 1-button 3,029 10,068

StatsD deploys deploys
Etsy deploy; 7
I joined (graphs!) in 10 in 11
launches deploys in 09

6/05 9/08 12/09 9/10 12/10 12/11 12/12

10x growth
September 2008
There are issues to address now and there will
most certainly be bumps on the technology side
as Etsy grows, but I want all of you Etsians to
know that it is an honor and a privilege to be
serving the Etsy community as your CTO. If you
can give me some time and understanding here
in my early days at Etsy, I hope to make you
proud.

- An Honest Beginning for Etsys New CTO

(company blog)
http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2008/tech-update-an-honest-beginning-for-etsys-new-cto/
Problems!
What was missing
at Etsy at the time
 Culture of transparency!
Monitoring
Metrics / Graphing
Automated testing
Error log analysis
The present
 Timeline

First 1-button 3,029 10,068

StatsD deploys deploys
Etsy deploy; 7
I joined (graphs!) in 10 in 11
launches deploys in 09

6/05 9/08 12/09 9/10 12/10 12/11 12/12

10x growth
Confidence as a Service
 Fred

Board members deploy!

Dogs deploy!
How we got there
Most important issue?
Culture.
 Peopleware:
the major problems of
our work are not so much
technological as
sociological in nature
Conways Law:

Any organization that

designs a system (defined
broadly) will produce a
design whose structure is a
copy of the organization's
communication structure.
- Melvin Conway, 1968
 Fix people and
team issues first.
Communication
Insist on transparency
 Operability reviews
http://www.slideshare.net/jallspaw/go-or-nogo-operability-and-contingency-planning-at-etsycom
 Blameless post-mortems
http://www.slideshare.net/jallspaw/advanced-postmortem-fu-and-human-error-101-velocity-2011
Key tools at Etsy
 Deployinator:
One button deploy
https://github.com/etsy/deployinator
 StatsD:
Graphs, democratized
https://github.com/etsy/statsd
 Code talks.

Make graphs!
Yes! No.
Dashboard Driven
Development**

**60,000 graphs, ~30 of the most

important ones on deploy dashboard
 Errors*

*Vertical lines are deploys!

Key business metrics*

*Vertical lines are deploys!

 Automated Testing
http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/04/20/divide-and-concur/
What continuous
deployment
gives Etsy
 Agility:
Always Be Shipping
MTTD / MTTR
Stability & predictability
 Encourages
experimentation
Developer happiness
DevOps
Scales trust and risk
Not being in a state to deploy is a matter of liability. It's
like having the only fire exit blocked. You ignore it at
everyone's peril.
Lacy Rhoades, Etsy Engineer
an ecosystem where the lazy, excitable
and impatient really shine
Andrew Morrison, Etsy Engineer
The Product Hacking Ecosystem
http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2012/01/04/the-product-hacking-ecosystem/
 Resources
Code as Craft blog
http://codeascraft.etsy.com/

Slides (including these)

http://www.slideshare.net/etsy

Github
http://github.com/etsy/

Join in the fun

http://www.etsy.com/careers/