Size as an Advantage: How Big Enterprises can Move FastVinay Kumar and Chetan Desai, Intuit

Postulate: Startups are nimble, Enterprises are slow.

Lots to lose Existing revenue and customers

Legacy Technology and Systems Services with proprietary APIs Data in silos

Security Standards

Why?

Some things suck for service developers at our company Provisioning hardware Configuring load balancers (pools, health checks, ACLs) Integrating with authentication Security Reviews/Standards Versioning Build and Deploy (getting bits onto servers, configuration

management) Differences between AWS and internal hosting

Time spent working on these problems is time not spent solving core customer problems.

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Can we use our size as an advantage?

Economies of Scale: Dedicate a team to solve these problems once Leverage solutions across many teams building

services

We started with:• Three new services, developed by independent

teams• A Service Platform team for solving common

problems

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Platform

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Dividing and Conquering“Collaboration via SLA”: Be explicit about which problems each team is responsible for solving Platform team solves common problems once. Service developers focus on their service’s

functionality

Not every problem will be solved perfectly initially, but as we get better over time, all services get improvements.

Platform Design Strategy Identify & front-load long lead time items (slow enterprise) Abstraction from hardware, flexibility on where to place

services on an as-need basis. Wide-ranges & uncertainty on service’s footprint

Define an SLA so that: Build & deploy is “free” Logging, monitoring is “free”

Remove the pain from service developers

Scope of V1TurboTax is a very seasonal business: Major product release December 1 for new Tax Year Customers arrive Jan-April

So we had to constrain our scope to deliver for this tax season: Hosting in internal data centers (no AWS) Three services (all dev teams in San Diego) All services built on Node No Docker or other container technology

Platform Implementation Long lead time identification:

Allocate hosting VMs up-front Load balance pool setup up-front

Flexibility: Allocate 20 ports per service across all platform VMs Multi-tenancy: where services live and # of instances is

a config change.

Provide solutions for SLA: Common health-check, logging, monitoring

Common Build & Deploy Template-based CI and Release build jobs Deployment through CDD

Allows developers to sign off& promote new versions

Re-usable chef cookbooks for: Deployment of node service code Upstart configuration (process management) Log management (logrotate & Splunk forwarding)

Reflections on V1Live in production this week, can reflect on development of V1

Worked Well Multi-tenancy Up-front Load

balancer configuration

Reusable Build & Deploy

Learned DevOps is

fundamental Lots of small

modules is ok Make it easy

to onboard

Needs Work Private npm

repo Share npm

modules Open Source

Growing our node expertiseProblem: Teams building services are learning node as they go. We envision many more teams building services on node.

Opportunity: Center of excellence of node knowledge.

How do we share and build up teams? “Embed an expert” model “Meetingless collaboration” model Enterprises can afford to do both

Wrap Up: How do enterprises move fast. Identify and prepare for slow-moving tasks Divide & Conquer – lots of expertise in a large size Service developers have a tradeoff between

control & conformity in a platform Create a platform that’s not “take it or leave it” Conformity made easy with open-collaboration npm

modules People like to adopt easy-to-use things

Thanks! Vinay Kumar

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sdvinay @sdvinay

Chetan Desai https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetanddesai @chetanddesai