Building Distributed Systems in Distributed Teams @ DevOpsDay Warsaw 2019

Building distributed systems is notoriously hard... building a distributed team, even more so. At Elastic — the company behind Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash — everything is distributed; the company and our products. This talk dives into the details of how Elastic is thriving on its distributed model:

- How Elastic started to be distributed by design.
- What our shared values are and what we have learned as we progressed and grew to our current size.
- What the day of an Elastician can look like.
- What we are using in terms of tooling.
- How we hire and onboard new employees.

Transcript

1. Building Distributed Systems
 in Distributed Teams Sebastian Grodzicki @ DevOpsDays 2019 @sebgrodzicki
2. Who is working from
 home? ȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱ
3. Who is working from a
 coworking space? ȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱ
4. Who is working from an
 office? ȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱ
5. Who can work from home for
 1 day/week? ȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱ
6. $ whoami Sebastian Grodzicki
 • Engineering Manager at • ex-CTO at SHOWROOM & GoldenLine • #LifeAtElastic @sebgrodzicki
7. ELK Elastic Stack
8. Cluster
9. Stats … … … … employees countries languages time zones
10. Stats
11. Stats + 1600 + 40 + 30 + 20 Elasticians countries languages time zones
12. 27 offices
13. DISTRIBUTED
 by design
14. Founders
15. DISTRIBUTED
 not remote
16. Office
17. Coworking space
18. Home office
19. Home office
20. Home office
21. Home office
22. X-School X-School
23. Elastic Heart
24. Elastic Heart
25. Elastic Heart
26. Engineering All Hands
27. Global All Hands
28. Volunteer Time Off
29. Our Source Code
37. Team
38. Leaders Team Lead Product Lead Tech Lead
39. Meetings • weekly team planning meeting • 1:1 with your manager • team time (informal/off-topic)
40. Bugpool,
 Demo day,
 Company All Hands, etc.
41. Release train Development QA Release Feature freeze QA Release Feature freeze QA Release Feature freeze Development Development Development
42. Semantic Versioning 7 4 2 . . major minor patch
43. Downsides
44. Downsides • share the pain of timezones • communication can fail • cultures are different • decisions can drag
45. Tools
46. Tools
47. Tools
48. Tools
49. Tools
50. Hiring
51. Hiring • Age, gender, location, race, … is just an attribute • hard technical & soft professional skills • 1,000+ CVs per week • no bullshit • max. 5 interviews
52. Hiring 500 to 600: 5 months 600 to 700: 3 months 700 to 800: 2 months
53. Hiring
54. Hiring 130 9 arrivals departures
55. Who wants to work from
 an office? ȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱ
56. Who wants to work from
 home? ȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱ
57. Questions?
58. Thank you!