Online gambling giant bet365 has set up a DevOps department into its existing business to progress automation and engineering principles that optimize monitoring, reporting, and self-diagnostics/healing.
The company’s newly assembled DevOps team is running out of its technology business Hillside Technology and operates out of its Stoke-on-Trent and Manchester sites. The department is headed by Steven Briggs who has been with bet365 for more than eight years.
The gambling operator’s DevOps team will bring together operational teams working in several departments within the organization, including software release, IT operations, service delivery, and problem management.
Bet365 hopes the move would help it ramp up automation in a number of fields, support software development, reduce delays in the roll-out of new applications, and improve site reliability.
The company would expect its new 70-strong DevOps team to discover new ways and principles that can increase and enhance sophistication in the monitoring and deployment pipelines.
Commenting on the recent establishment of bet365’s DevOps department, its head said that he does not see “DevOps changing software development practices”, but provides assistance in an organization’s effort to keep up with “the consistent need to release software, while ensuring the platform remains stable and secure.”
Gaining Insight Into Live Systems’ Health
Mr. Briggs said that they believe the move to DevOps will enable bet365 to automate more of its IT operations over the course of the next 12 months. The gambling company would not be able to make a holistic change across its whole IT estate within 12 months, the DevOps team head pointed out, but they would look to focus most of their attention “where the needs are greatest.”
The DevOps department’s goal would be to automate more and more IT tasks and thus reduce the repetitiveness of many IT operations. This would provide administrators with more time to focus on more complex tasks that do not involve as many repetitive actions.
Mr. Briggs said that his experience has shown that automation prompts a snowball effect, as people gain more and more confidence about automating various manual tasks. He went on that modernizing their approach to operational and release activity is imperative and that they believe “a DevOps approach” is the right one that would help them achieve their goal.
His team would gain insight into the health of bet365’s live systems and share that insight with the company’s development teams.
“We want to give operations the tooling, dashboards and automation needed to increase the value it offers the business”, Mr. Briggs further pointed out. He also noted that bet365’s DevOps department would “build a view of how all parts of the system work together and progress engineering principles that make monitoring, reporting and self-diagnostics/healing more achievable.”
Bet365’s headquarters and main technology hub are located in Stoke. In 2016, the company opened its satellite technology office in Manchester. Last year, bet365 created 100 new jobs to expand its Manchester operation. As mentioned above, the online bookmaker’s DevOps team will operate from both Stoke and Manchester.
Source: Bet365 backs DevOps to improve site reliability, Computer Weekly
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