Senior Software Engineer at Gamesys, Zsolt Szilard Sztupak, proclaimed his road to DevOps at this year’s National DevOps Conference.

Even with a helping hand from developers, testers, deploys, monitors, log, configuration management and collaboration platforms, the online gaming company’s road to DevOps wasn’t straightforward. “Our road to DevOps consisted of monthly releases, downtime during release, costly meetings between teams, communication issues and late integration issues,” said Sztupak.

In a bid for Gamesys to change its path another route needed to be found. “We needed to find a way to prevent the following issues: we needed to split up monolith, create a platform that allows people to create microservices easily, deploy those microservices, automate processes and automate what’s on the Dev’ side,” he added.

Before the change, backend and frontend teams were separated, teams were effectively going at different speeds and frontend and backend teams were merged into verticals.

“A platform team needed to be built up from members of different teams. We set up to drive the move to microservices, gave ourselves more leeway in assessing new technologies, created Dropwizard (a common platform) and found a way of specifying our APIs,” revealed Sztupak.

After 5 months and 3 weeks they finally found solutions. Legacy-in-a-box removed the convoluted build and deployment process, and made it easy to make changes to the legacy monolith.

“To ensure that the following was achieved, teams started to create microservices even though there was no way of deploying them, containers were introduced, GoCD was used as a framework, and everything was built automatically in git,” he added, concluding that Ansible, Docker and GoCD are the backbone of DevOps technologies.

Written by Leah Alger