Open Tech Calendar

This time round we have Andy Burgin from Sky Betting and Gaming and John Ewing from Skyscanner. We look forward to seeing you.

Andy Burgin

The Data tribe at Sky Betting and Gaming manages the Data Warehouse, reporting and CRM platforms for the business. This talk discusses the evolution of the technical squads that build and run those platforms over the past 18 months, focusing on how the Datops squad has acted as a catalyst for change. Firstly we'll cover how the busines has grown and how the data tribe became a key focus for the business.

Next we'll talk about how this caused a small DatOps squad to change its focus from ops/sysadmin to a devops approach, changing team dynamics and responsibilities through tooling and automation whilst still keeping it's focus on their "customers". We'll look at the original technologies and how they have evolved into our current toolset along with the problems, successes and failures, sharing lessons learned even if they weren't good.

But, this talk isn't about the destination, it's about the journey and we've still a lot of work to do, the final part of the talk will share what we still have to do and the challenges that presents.

About Andy:

I'm Andy Burgin, I've spent the last 2 years working as Lead Devops Engineer at Sky Betting and Gaming where I look after their data analytics platform, before that worked on the web platform keeping services up and running across hundreds of nodes. The previous 20 years of my career we're spent working at design and build web development agencies being a dev/sysadmin for SMEs and Blue Chips.

In 2013 I formed the local Devops group to meet people who were also "doing devops" and soon realised that there was far more to devops than I had anticipated. I now speak at other local meet up groups and the phpnw unconf about Devops, Lean and TOC and how that all relates to flow. I've presented an ignite at DevopsDays Paris on running a devops group, I was also part of the Arrested Devops podcast discussing Devops Communities.

John Ewing

John is the squad lead for the Real Time Data squad at SkyScanner and he’ll be talking about their move away from Graphite as a metrics platform and which tools they moved to, he’ll be sharing the lessons learned from the experience.