Infrastucture - An Order of Magnitude
We did a thing and you didn’t even notice.
Software Development is a weird old creature. Many people probably think that we spent our time creating new features, widgets and experimenting with new technology and generally sciencing the spit out things. Sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it’s not. I’ve spent much of the last decade working with improving code quality, structuring and organisation code in a way that allows as seamless as possible upgrades and improvements and it’s still every bit as interesting and exciting as the new technology on the block. Don’t get me wrong I love to keep up to date with the latest and greatest improvements, indeed this week the Dev Team were at MongoDB.local London investigating the new features on offer. But we’re always aware that we’re constantly working towards a moving target in terms of modernising and keeping our code as up to date and fresh as possible.
We’ve spent the best part of the last year working towards upgrading our internal systems and on Thursday morning we upgraded our internal application framework, by a significant order of magnitude too. We’re extemely happy to be making steps towards ensuring our platform is as robust, secure and reliable as possible. Every upgrade unlocks more possibily and benefits and we will leverage that in the months to come. Be that speeds improvements, new features that were previously in a limited position to implement. Today is a significant milestone and yet you didn’t even notice. Don’t feel bad. We want our upgrades to be smooth like your favourite hot chocolate.
In the 30 minutes since deploy we’d had a few errors (and even with a test suite of 10,000 tests there are going to be bugs), but no major alerts, no phonecalls, no explosions. All bugs were managable, and all resolved without any incident and many of you didn’t notice that either because our systems track bugs and we act to resolve them quickly before you reach for the phone to call.
It’s an extremely satisfying moment to get here, so we’re going to take a pause have a deep breath, a cup of tea and then start on the next improvement. Rince, Repeat, Rejoice.
