Confidently Automating Changes Across a Diverse Fleet

The presentation titled Confidently Automating Changes Across a Diverse Fleet is delivered by Casey Bleifer, a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. It addresses the challenges and strategies for automating code changes across a diverse software fleet.

Key points of the presentation include:

• Challenges in Software Migrations: Casey begins with a story illustrating the difficulty of achieving full adoption of a new software version, often leading to a long tail of migrations that can take months or years, leaving systems vulnerable.
• Goals for Automation: The team aims to automate fleet-wide code changes in a week or less, and critical vulnerability fixes in two days, with minimal effort required from platform and software owners.
• Automation Platform Development: A fleetwide automation platform was developed, encompassing campaigns (migrations) and targets (software requiring migration), with steps defined for each target.
• Confidence Metrics: A confidence metric is used to ensure safety and reliability of automation, allowing automatic merging of pull requests if the confidence level is high.
• Results and Ongoing Improvements: Initial exercises revealed a need for manual interventions in many cases. Improvements have reduced time for completing migrations and the percentage requiring manual intervention, though challenges remain.
• Partnership and Collaboration: Emphasizing teamwork and cross-functional partnerships as crucial to the success of large-scale automation efforts.

Casey concludes with the idea that automating changes across diverse systems is a continuing journey, with significant progress already made but with more improvements to be achieved in the future .

This is the end of the AI-generated content.

Maintaining up-to-date and secure software across a polyglot fleet is a challenge for any engineering organization. Manual migrations and urgent updates disrupt productivity and require coordination across many teams. Often, these migrations take months or longer to accomplish, leaving the fleet vulnerable or forcing platform teams to maintain multiple software versions throughout the course of the migration. In this talk, I’ll share our ongoing journey to automate fleetwide changes in one week or less. This presentation will focus on:

• How to think about safely orchestrating changes at scale
• Designing automation for a diverse software ecosystem
• Challenges we face as we work to reach our goal