Vertex US Spotlight: A Q&A with John Laban, OpsLevel CEO & Co-founder
Last summer, we conducted dozens of interviews with leading DevOps practitioners to better understand their challenges and opportunities. One issue that repeatedly came up in conversation was service ownership and the many questions that surround the subject (how an organization defines ownership of a service, how new engineers sort out what components to use, and how new tools and practices are distributed across teams and included in all services, to name a few.)
Exploring these challenges, and understanding the opportunity at hand for a company that could resolve them, fortunately, led us to John Laban, co-founder of OpsLevel.
Give us your elevator pitch — what does your company do?
OpsLevel helps engineering teams adopt a DevOps culture of “you build it, you own it.” We catalog all of your services, systems, tools, deployments, practices, and other operational info and ensure that everything has an owner. This service ownership model helps teams fix incidents faster, speed up onboarding, and develop reliable software more quickly.
What sparked your idea to start the company?
Back in 2010, I agreed to join a very early stage company named PagerDuty as their first employee. It was a wild ride as PagerDuty grew fast in parallel with the growth of the DevOps movement. Development teams were increasingly taking on end-to-end ownership of their software — including operational work — and PagerDuty was helping them set up fair and reliable on-call rotations.
But while going on-call was an important part of service ownership, it was only one part, and it was very reactive (e.g. trying to quickly fix downtime and security breaches when they happen). My co-founder Ken ( also an early PagerDuty employee) and I saw a lot of companies struggling with service ownership as microservices architectures proliferated: There was an explosion of services, and all that stuff needed ownership. And there wasn’t any tooling out there to help them manage that ownership and try to be more proactive about preventing downtime and security issues. We even saw some big and operationally-mature companies spend tons of time and effort building their own internal tooling to solve this issue. That gave us an idea: Let’s take the best ideas from these internal tools and build a service ownership platform available to everyone.
If you were to draw a line from your current passion for this field back in time to a specific point in your youth, where would it go? Tell us about that memory.
I remember taking a distributed systems course in school. I loved it: working with distributed systems, thinking through distributed consensus protocols, etc. It could get so complicated with all these systems talking to each other over flaky networks, but as long as they all followed a few simple rules, everything would just work. It was like this kind of elegant dance.
When you were a kid, what did you think you’d grow up to be?
I think I always knew I wanted to work with computers or software in some way when I was a kid. Computers were complex, but always so logical and therefore straightforward — way easier to understand than people. I had to get a lot better at working with people as I got older :)
Where did you start your career? What was your first job in this industry?
My first full-time job out of university was as an SDE at Amazon. Even back then they had a massive service-oriented architecture, as they had invested early in breaking up their monolith (named “Obidos.”) Out of necessity, they had a you-build-it, you-own-it culture. They did DevOps before it was cool.
I was going on-call right away, wearing a pager on my belt and everything. (And yes, pagers were archaic back then too. Whenever I saw someone else walking around Seattle with a pager on their belt I knew they also worked at Amazon.)
What unlikely/unexpected person or chance meeting affected your career path?
Before my co-founder Ken and I founded OpsLevel, we worked together at PagerDuty. In fact, I hired him there: He got the first offer when I opened what eventually became PagerDuty’s Canadian office. But Ken turned down the offer!
It was only a couple months after that, when I happened to see him again randomly at some meetup in Toronto, that I pinned him down and somehow convinced him to start doing part-time contracting for PagerDuty. Part-time contracting eventually turned into full-time contracting, which turned into a permanent position lasting four years.
Then, several years later, we ended up founding OpsLevel together. So I’m really glad I saw him at that meetup that one time, or we wouldn’t be where we are today.
When you reflect on your life and work, what are you proud of?
I’m very proud of the culture that we’ve built at OpsLevel. It’s something we’ve been purposeful about from the beginning, something we think about every day, and we’ve built it to the point where I love working with everyone here.
I’m also very proud of what I was able to build as PagerDuty’s first employee. Over the years, I helped shape a lot of how they develop software, including driving an agile transformation as well as a DevOps reorganization/transformation. And, of course, their Canadian presence.
What additional impact does your company have that didn’t make it into your elevator pitch?
Engineering teams often find they need a catalog like OpsLevel once they have more than 30–50 microservices; it helps manage the complexity of a large and diverse architecture.
But beyond just cataloging things, OpsLevel helps larger companies measure and improve their overall operational maturity: they can codify their production readiness checklists into something that can be monitored continuously. OpsLevel can then be used to drive some consistency in how they build and operate their services, with a focus on improving their reliability and security.
What’s something that your coworkers don’t know about you?
Although I don’t have a ton of time to spend on it, I love cooking. Ironically, I love the kind of cooking that takes a ton of time: smoking brisket, ribs, pulled pork, etc. Or experimenting with sous-vide cooking. And I love crafting cocktails.
What is your desert island book or movie?
I can be a bit too practical and literal when answering questions, so I’d probably opt to bring something like The Survival Handbook or Edible Wild Plants.
You have a whole day at your disposal, but work isn’t allowed. What do you do?
Playtime with my 5-year-old daughter!
If you could solve one issue in the startup world by snapping your fingers, what would it be and why?
Immigration — both in Canada and especially the US — seems pretty broken. It can be super hard to bring in much-needed skilled and specialized talent. The pressure on improving this has been reduced somewhat this year due to the shift to working remotely, but that also comes coupled with more work moving out-of-country — and the associated loss of skilled jobs, dollars from the economy, and tax dollars in the process.
Name and unpack one challenge in working at a startup that no one ever told you about?
There aren’t enough hours in a day. This isn’t some sort of surprise or revelation, of course. But it’s just shocking the difference between how much you want to do, and how much you can get done in any given day. One of our values at OpsLevel is around focus and efficiency, where we try to make sure we’re focused on the most important things. But even then, there are always a ton of worthwhile things to do, which makes prioritization even more critical.
What’s the best advice you’ve gotten that you’d share again?
Keep things as simple as possible, but no simpler. When running a startup, keeping things simple — in how we build software, in our product design, and in how we work — keeps us moving fast and innovating.
Thank you for sharing your story, John!
This was also published on LinkedIn.
