Etsy has adopted a practice of continuous deployment where small code changes are frequently deployed to production. This began in 2009 with 7 deploys and increased to over 10,000 deploys in 2011. Continuous deployment has transformed Etsy and allowed for agility, improved stability, and developer happiness. It was enabled by establishing a culture of transparency, effective monitoring, automated testing, and other tools like Deployinator for one-button deploys and StatsD for analytics.

1. Continuous Deployment
at Etsy
March 10, 2012
SXSW
Chad Dickerson, CEO
chad@etsy.com / @chaddickerson

3. By the numbers
1.4B page views per month
$525MM sales on Etsy in 2011
39MM unique visitors / month
800K shops / 150 countries
100+ engineers

4. “The Etsy Way”
http://etsy.me/etsyway

5. Our simple definition of
continuous deployment:
Small, frequent changes
to production.

6. Continuous deployment
transformed Etsy

7. Timeline
First 1-button 3,029 10,068
StatsD deploys deploys
Etsy deploy; 7
I joined (graphs!) in ‘10 in ‘11
launches deploys in ’09
6/05 9/08 12/09 9/10 12/10 12/11 12/12
10x growth

8. September 2008

9. “There are issues to address now and there will
most certainly be bumps on the technology side
as Etsy grows, but I want all of you Etsians to
know that it is an honor and a privilege to be
serving the Etsy community as your CTO. If you
can give me some time and understanding here
in my early days at Etsy, I hope to make you
proud.”
- An Honest Beginning for Etsy’s New CTO
(company blog)
http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2008/tech-update-an-honest-beginning-for-etsys-new-cto/

10. Problems!

11. What was missing
at Etsy at the time

12. • Culture of transparency!
• Monitoring
• Metrics / Graphing
• Automated testing
• Error log analysis

13. The present

14. Timeline
First 1-button 3,029 10,068
StatsD deploys deploys
Etsy deploy; 7
I joined (graphs!) in ‘10 in ‘11
launches deploys in ’09
6/05 9/08 12/09 9/10 12/10 12/11 12/12
10x growth

15. Confidence as a Service

16. Fred
Board members deploy!

17. Dogs deploy!

18. How we got there

19. Most important issue?
Culture.

20. Peopleware:
“the major problems of
our work are not so much
technological as
sociological in nature”

21. Conway’s Law:
“Any organization that
designs a system (defined
broadly) will produce a
design whose structure is a
copy of the organization's
communication structure.”
- Melvin Conway, 1968

22. Fix people and
team issues first.

23. Communication

24. Insist on transparency

25. Operability reviews
http://www.slideshare.net/jallspaw/go-or-nogo-operability-and-contingency-planning-at-etsycom

26. Blameless post-mortems
http://www.slideshare.net/jallspaw/advanced-postmortem-fu-and-human-error-101-velocity-2011

27. Key tools at Etsy

28. Deployinator:
One button deploy
https://github.com/etsy/deployinator

32. StatsD:
Graphs, democratized
https://github.com/etsy/statsd

33. Code talks.
Make graphs!

34. Yes! No.

35. Dashboard Driven
Development**
**60,000 graphs, ~30 of the most
important ones on deploy dashboard

36. Errors*
*Vertical lines are deploys!

37. Key business metrics*
*Vertical lines are deploys!

38. Automated Testing
http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/04/20/divide-and-concur/

39. What continuous
deployment
gives Etsy

40. Agility:
Always Be Shipping

41. MTTD / MTTR

42. Stability & predictability

43. Encourages
experimentation

44. Developer happiness

45. DevOps

46. Scales trust and risk

47. “Not being in a state to deploy is a matter of liability. It's
like having the only fire exit blocked. You ignore it at
everyone's peril.”
— Lacy Rhoades, Etsy Engineer

48. “an ecosystem where the lazy, excitable
and impatient really shine”
— Andrew Morrison, Etsy Engineer
“The Product Hacking Ecosystem”
http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2012/01/04/the-product-hacking-ecosystem/

49. Resources
Code as Craft blog
http://codeascraft.etsy.com/
Slides (including these)
http://www.slideshare.net/etsy
Github
http://github.com/etsy/
Join in the fun
http://www.etsy.com/careers/