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Welcome to Level-Up, an exclusive interview series with standout engineering leaders who share what’s top of mind for them. This interview puts the spotlight on Seth Lochen, Senior Engineering Manager at Groupon. Let us know who we should talk to next!

Snyk is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for businesses that want to build security into their continuous software development processes. And with their developer-first tooling and best-in-class security intelligence, it’s no surprise.

We’re kicking off an interview series, called Level-Up, with standout engineering leaders to learn what’s top of mind for them. Check out the full interview at the bottom of this post. And let us know who we should talk to next!

Embracing a microservice architecture typically also means deploying much more frequently, which can seem scary. But favoring many incremental deploys is actually a sound risk mitigation strategy since changes tend to be smaller and more isolated.

Earlier this month OpsLevel added personalized, automated notifications to our Service Maturity offering. With these weekly emails, service owners don’t need to remember to review their services in OpsLevel; each Monday OpsLevel will send them a digest report that makes it simple to stay on top of service maturity and encourages a regular review cadence.

A service catalog is a valuable asset for any growing engineering organization delivering software at scale. But valuable assets aren’t created or earned easily. That’s why, at OpsLevel, we’re always thinking about ways to make building and maintaining an up-to-date service catalog simpler. Recently we upgraded our Discovered Services capabilities to do just that.

Over the last decade, shrinking feedback loops have been a core part of building and delivering software. Across every phase of development and delivery, software engineering organizations are getting faster answers to questions like:

Let's explore Backstage, the problems it attempts to solve, and considerations to make before bringing it into your organization.

Over the last week, the team at OpsLevel completed its largest HackDay ever. OpsLevelers demoed 15 different projects, spanning everything from our infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines to our Applicant Tracking System and assets for acquiring and onboarding customers. Even our CEO carved out time to write some code–though he admitted his UI was lacking.

Today, Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container orchestration, running in approximately half of all containerized environments. Platform and infrastructure teams of all shapes and sizes are accustomed to operating Kubernetes in order to run their organizations’ microservices (and applications) at any scale.

At OpsLevel we believe Service Ownership is the future of DevOps. We believe this subtle, but important, shift can bring tons of benefits to engineering teams: autonomy, speed, resiliency, and accountability. We build new features in OpsLevel with these characteristics in mind; that’s why we’ve recently launched automatically personalized dashboards for all OpsLevel users.

Enabling Service Ownership is our north star at OpsLevel. We believe that true service ownership is the future of DevOps and a key to building agile, efficient engineering teams. As a part of making service ownership a reality, we’ve recognized that teams own services, not people. But of course, when you need to get something done urgently, you want to talk to a person, not a team. That’s why OpsLevel now supports tracking functional team membership alongside core service metadata.

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.

Our software ecosystems grow more complex every year. With new frameworks, dependencies, and technologies to help automate or simplify every step of the development life cycle, keeping track of requirements that provide reliability and security can become difficult. And that’s why production readiness reviews and checklists help eliminate cognitive load. They let you focus more on features or potential failure points.

Kubernetes is great because of its almost limitless configurability. But this configurability makes it hard to ensure that best practices are followed consistently across your cluster.