DevOps is becoming one of the most popular and widely adopted methodologies in the tech world. This is a statement we have all heard many times over, but who is actually using DevOps? A lot of major enterprises, that’s who. From government organizations to the biggest social media sites in the world, DevOps has been adopted by some of the most innovative IT teams in the world. Here is a list of the top 9 companies you wouldn’t expect using DevOps.
Starbucks
Starbucks started its DevOps initiative in April of 2015 with their #DevOpsTogether campaign. Which is a touch cliche due to the fact that DevOps basically means together, but that is beside the point. According to this Medium.com article, Starbucks CEO is a big supporter of the DevOps idea and is working to keep his company technically innovative.
Ancestry.com
As an early adopter of the DevOps movement, Ancestry.com should be seen as one of the pioneers in the Continuous Delivery and DevOps movements. Switching to these popular methodologies back in 2013 has made a real impact on their release times and company happiness. To learn more about their process, migration, and DevOps culture check out a couple of their articles here.
Ashley Madison
No one said this was going to be a DevSecOps blog, even though the recent database hack has become a poster child for DevOps security. At the risk of starting a much larger conversation, I will say the debacle surrounding this illustrious company has helped shed light on the fact that maybe DevOps doesn’t always need to mean faster and more often. Here is a DevOps security article with some good points.
Etsy
This company DevOps (used as a verb?). Not only is Etsy a super cool company that is perfect for buying all of your holiday gifts, they also DevOps hard. In 2008 they were watching Flickr release 10 deploys a day, by 2009 they were building their own tools to release code better, faster, and not only by the dev team. You should most definitely read this great “How Etsy makes DevOps Work” feature and check out their Code as Craft blog.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Ha! I bet you wouldn’t have expected this one. The U.S. Government is surprisingly active in the DevOps space with the Department of Justice, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Reserve all adopting the methodology. Hopefully DevOps is helping them get through all of that paperwork and bureaucracy movies tell us they have to deal with constantly.
I feel like LinkedIn is an obvious choice to be a major DevOps user. The LinkedIn team started using deployment automation tools waaaay back in 2009 to manage the complexity of releasing hundreds of applications/services on a 1000+ node environment. Now they are cultivating the worlds DevOps communities. Check out this article about one of the first tools they used.
NASA
Whether you knew NASA was using DevOps or not, it’s still super cool. Our most beloved methodology is probably the main reason we are on Mars right now. Maybe that is a bit of a stretch….or maybe it isn’t. Either way, NASA has been thinking about software deployment since 2004 when they first adopted JIRA and they’ve been reaching for the DevOps stars ever since.
Apple
Don’t let Apple’s huge IOS updates and its big September reveals coax you into thinking they aren’t on the cusp of technology innovation. While Apple’s involvement in DevOps is not widely written about, they are slowly buying the right tools and hiring the right people that will allow them to lead the pack in daily deployments. Are watch deployments a thing yet?
Airbnb
Like Netflix and Uber, Airbnb is considered one of those “third platform” companies because they leverage social, mobile, analytics and the cloud. Being a third platform company inevitably leads straight to the DevOps methodology, allowing them to release their multiple small deployments quickly. If you are interested in learning more about Airbnb’s data and infrastructure, check out this slide deck.
