Lead Software Engineer on the Metrics Pipeline team at New Relic, Jose Fernandez, recently highlighted how DevOps was first implemented on the company’s blog.

New Relic Engineers have grasped DevOps philosophy after following the same methodology, by operating identical beneficial technologies.

Two technologies in particular, Cassandra and Docker, have helped New Relic reach its path to success. Both programmes are useful for storing data in MySQL, but have their differences. Cassandra is a Java written tool, which can be debugged and examined thoroughly by code developers. Docker shows a different approach, lowering barriers between dev and ops, using the same command for operating deployment units.

Two internal tools that work alongside Docker are Centurion and Shipright. Centurion is an open source that simplifies Docker containers, ensuring that the deployment environment specifies configuration and that it remains the same on dev laptops and production machines, whereas Shipright generates Dockerfiles from base containers to fleets of machines with environment specific configuration.

The culture shift

The move towards DevOps at first required a big cultural shift, but soon showed rewards; development teams are less frustrated because of the dismissal of bottlenecks and hardstops, SREs help install a strong written culture by documenting everything, and the use of a simple system which measures whether or not different teams are blocked, with red, yellow, and green status indicators has helped organisation and communication.

Edited from sources by Leah Alger