bet365, the online gambling company, has today announced the creation of a new department that will introduce DevOps practices into the business.
The DevOps function combines several operational teams who will collaborate in identifying new principles, technologies and ways of working that can drive operational automation, increase monitoring sophistication and enhance deployment pipelines.
Hillside Technology, the technology business of bet365, is also forming a site reliability engineering team. Recruitment for which is currently underway.
“As the scale and scope of our business has increased, so the underlying technologies and platform that support it have become more complex,” said Steven Briggs, head of DevOps at Hillside Technology. “The critical question is how to keep pace with the consistent need to release software, while ensuring the platform remains stable and secure? Modernising our approach to operational and release activity is imperative and we believe a DevOps approach can help with this.”
How to build a DevOps team — 6 principles for success
The DevOps programme will be driven by three key priorities:
- The introduction of software engineering approaches into the classic infrastructure environment to drive automation.
- Improving the breadth, depth and sophistication of monitoring and the level of insight that can be gained regarding the health of the live estate via dashboards and analytics tooling.
- The delivery of an intelligent platform that can self-diagnose and neutralise application issues before they affect the customer.
“We want to give Operations the tooling, dashboards and automation needed to increase the value it offers the business. This will involve breaking out of the team and technology silos that can otherwise hinder how the end-to-end system is understood and managed. We will 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,” said Briggs.
“We’ve always ensured that our Development teams don’t design software in blissful ignorance of operational concerns,” added Briggs. “Ensuring the live system is fit for purpose has always been a shared responsibility. Many of the issues that DevOps attempts to resolve aren’t an issue for us. For us, the incorporation of DevOps practices will help progress automation, establish sophisticated monitoring and optimise release processes.”
Related articles
Is your technology business structured for success?
Understanding the viability of blockchain in supply chain management
Driving business value with responsible AI
Emerging technologies, are they set to transform business?
EU artificial intelligence guidelines will help unlock potential of AI technology
