Rodrigo Reis

Rodrigo Reis has been at Zalando since 5 years. He started building software for the company's tech platform, had a stint with IAM, and on the way helped develop an awesome OAuth2 provider - curiously named Plan B. Most recently he's helping developing Zalando's own Kubernetes infrastructure. Out of work he's always striving to find the latest progressive rock/metal festivals, on the search for the ultimate polyrhythm.

Radical Deployment Automation For Truly Hands-Off Production Environments

I will present Zalando’s “Hands-Off” approach for production deployments using Kubernetes hosted on AWS. The talk will describe the main challenges we had to ship applications to production environments in a compliant and secure way, and at the same time with ease of use to the developers.

Kubernetes was introduced at Zalando for a multitude of reasons, like infrastructure efficiency and reliability of services. This was also an opportunity for a change in our build and deployment processes.

It is our purpose that developers should focus on the needs of business applications they’re developing. However, things like compliance, security and not so easy to use tooling can get in the way. With this in mind, we made a radical change in how we build and ship software to AWS, specifically to Kubernetes.

I will describe:

Our infrastructure setup, based in AWS/Kubernetes;
How we manage to scale our setup to all Zalando and keep growing;
What we are doing to automate many steps, from repository creation to live deploy;
How we secure our environments.

All this has the purpose to increase velocity from a developer’s Idea to a Live deploy, and at the same time taking a lot of weight from our developer’s shoulders, so they can spend most of their time working on their actual business applications.