How Netflix Supports DevOps at Scale – InApps 2022

How Technology And Culture Influence Each Other

Also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, PlayerFM, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn

In this newest episode of InApps Makers podcast, we spoke with Dianne Marsh, director of engineering for engineering tools at Netflix. Her team is responsible for building the tools, including Spinnaker, that the other teams use for deploying their changes to the cloud. It also means that her team is at the pinnacle of helping their developers increase their productivity.

It’s not just the technology that plays a central role in Netflix’ story, she said, it’s also the culture. Marsh believes that technology influences the culture and culture influences the technology. You are going to either build tools or adopt them. These tools either complement your culture or challenge it.

“We want to make sure that all the engineers at Netflix are able to work as fast and as responsibly fast as they want to work. If we don’t give them enough context about what they’re deploying or about what’s going on in the ecosystem at large then they could cause big problems in the service. They could cause disruptions in the service,” said Marsh. “So, we’ve built a lot of guardrails into our tools that give context to our developers to help them make good choices.”

In This Edition:

1:00: The kinds of problems Marsh’s team is trying to solve at Netflix.
2:56: How do you ensure despite developer freedom that there is integration between teams?
3:47: How Netflix uses tools in order to give context to developers.
8:19: What kind of challenge is there for Netflix in investing resources in projects such as Spinnaker to be used by the wider ecosystem?
10:51: Open source licensing and the legal process for developers.
14:35: How culture influences technology and how technology influences culture.