Release Engineering from the Ground Up

The Search Team at the New York Times manages multiple internal and external facing services, powering everything from Site Search to a public Semantic API. Each of these services are unique, comprising various programming languages, API servers, webservers, distributed databases, and so on.

Recently we undertook a complete revamp of our entire toolchain: migrating from SVN to GitHub, running and configuring a new build system, taking ownership over metrics and monitoring throughout the entire stack. Building out this toolchain from scratch afforded us the opportunity to carefully evaluate our needs and weigh the tradeoffs. One of our primary focuses was achieving continuous automated deployments.

This presentation will provide an overview of the process and tooling we selected, illustrating path code travels from development to production. Attendees can expect a serious deliberation over balancing time to production vs test coverage, as well as a discussion of the custom tooling we developed for collecting and displaying release metrics.

Tom Santero is a Software Engineer at The New York Times Company, working on Search, Archives and Semantics. Previously, Tom was Director of Evangelism at Basho Technologies, makers of the Riak distributed database. An ardent advocate of lifelong learning (and alliteration), Tom is an active member of the FP and distributed systems community, organizes the NYC Erlang users group and currently sits as an Industry Track Co-Chair for the 2015 ACM International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems.