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Distributed microservice architectures are increasingly common today as engineering teams seek to scale both their applications and headcount. But for all the advantages of microservices, they’re not without tradeoffs. One area of concern is the web of dependencies that’s naturally created as more microservices are built and deployed.

More software, more problems? Software is eating the world and that means more people and teams are developing software. To stay current and competitive, modern organizations are scaling their software engineering teams.

The term “DevOps” entered the IT industry in 2009 with the first DevOpsDays event held in Ghent, Belgium. But the world is constantly changing. Since 2009, the IT space has shifted dramatically. Containers, microservices, and “serverless” computing have all taken the world by storm in the last decade. The term “DevOps” has also undergone a sort of transformation, though OpsLevel is bringing it back to its roots of Service Ownership.

How we started: thumbnails with smartcropper. In the very early days of OpsLevel, our marketing website was powered by WordPress. Even though our site then was small, WordPress was a pretty big moving part that required more maintenance than it was worth. We found ourselves spending time on upgrading both WordPress and its plugins, debugging when things broke, and managing performance. We also found that drafts were not a great workflow for previewing or staging changes as the live production site wouldn’t always look the same as a draft edit.

Years ago, end-to-end software development involved dividing tasks based on where they fell in the system life cycle. One team wrote the code. Then another team deployed it to production. And yet another team monitored and maintained the service. This led to a lot of friction, needless handoffs, and bottlenecks.

Engineering initiatives are a necessity when it comes to ensuring security, reliability, and keeping the lights on within an organization. These can include actions such as upgrading library versions, migrating everyone to a new metrics provider, or upgrading a framework.

When starting a new job, have you ever asked yourself: How much time should I spend learning about the code? The product? The process? Was I expected to know Technology/Framework/Design Pattern X?Is my ticket taking too long?

Let’s get DevOps to mean Service Ownership again. We broke DevOps. And it’s preventing us from building. When the first cloud providers emerged in the mid-2000s, they unlocked a new superpower: the ability to near-instantly provision hardware. Service-oriented architecture and microservices developed as a new architectural pattern. As a result, DevOps emerged as a practice to organize engineering teams around those new services - combining development and operations responsibilities onto the same team.

Over the last few months at OpsLevel, we’ve changed how we tell interview candidates we’re not moving forward. Instead of a templated response, we now provide specific and actionable feedback for each candidate about where they fell short in our interview process and how they can improve. The results have been spectacular.