Summary At Hippo, we have dozens of engineers across teams, with very different access patterns. Managing this gets very complicated, very fast. Also, we have Single Sign On. We use OneLogin, but honestly, any SAML with an API will work so keep reading. What problem(s) are you trying to solve? Automatically inviting new users to our Github organization Automatically remove users that are no longer active Manage Github team permissions from SAML Terraform We terraform for every piece of infrastructure we can....
Make Integration Testing Fun Again
At Hippo Insurance, we build an integration testing framework/infrastructure that makes writing integration tests a no-brainer and super productive (and fun). Why integration tests? Unit tests and TDD are amazing. Seriously. However, they are just not enough. We have a service-oriented architecture that runs about ~50 services in production. Between Frontend, Gateway, Backend, Workers, Queues, and more. Writing a unit test for each of these is simply not enough, and it does not cover you in a case of regression during configuration (or anything else for that matter)....
The Hippo Paas
At Hippo Insurance, we built a platform as a service that allows engineers to add/mutate service-infrastructure simple and engineer-friendly. Before I talk about the platform itself, I want to spend bit of time explaining the choices that we made along the way to make this possible, scalable, and super efficient. Polyglot out, well crafted OTF products in At Hippo, we have dozens of micro-services. We choose to not allow teams to write a service in any language/framework they want....
Onboarding New Engineers My Recipe
Onboarding new people to the team is a challenge. Making sure they have a good experience and are set up for success can be quite a hurdle. If you think about it for a second, being a new engineer on a team (any team), is such a challenge. There are so many things to need to learn, systems to read about, culture to fit into, intimidating right? Over the years, I found a way to deal with this that works for me (and my teams)....
Analyzing Your Aws Api Calls for Fun and Profit (And Security)
AWS has a very powerful API. With time, as the organization grows, you query that API quite a bit. At [Globality])(https://www.globality.com), we query that API from multiple sources: Cluster management Monitoring UI Terraform Enterprise Deployment pipeline We also have very strict security requirements. Working with enterprise customers, we are required to analyze and provide reporting for everything that happens on our AWS accounts. To begin with, not a lot of people have access to that account, for production, that number is even smaller....
Our flexible cluster solution - How we run micro-services efficiently
At Globality, we’ve been running Docker in production for the past ~3 years. Over the years, we made many changes to our cluster management, making it better, more flexible, cost-effective, and scalable. In this post, I describe our solution and dive into the technical details, the challenges, etc. What is cluster management Kubernetes/ECS/Mesosphere are cluster managers. They allow you to run any number of tasks on top of machines that act as a cluster....
1:1 Question: What Is Your Stress Level since we last met?
One of the most effective tools in your toolbox as a manager is the 1:1 meeting. I have 1:1 with every member of my staff on a weekly basis. It’s a great opportunity to get feedback, provide context and just connect on a different level than the standup or pair programming sessions. In my first 1:1 with a new staff member, I emphasize that the 1:1 is their time, not mine....
On Culture
I see a lot of people talking about “culture fit”. I wanted to spend some time telling you what it means to me. First, let’s establish the baseline. I am an engineering manager at Globality. I have 16+ years of experience in this industry and I worked for and with startups and big companies like HP, Intel, SAP and others. I saw a lot of teams and a lot of “cultures”....
Using Bots to Solve Developer Drudgery
Scaling an engineering organization has a lot of moving parts. One of the parts we discuss rarely is reducing friction and reducing time spent on menial tasks to the absolute minimum. Figuring out “What is hard?” and “Should it be this hard or time-consuming?” is critical to the success of your organization. In this post, I’ll discuss flows we automated with bots. Pull request review We have an internal library that many our backend services share....
Breaking the Terraform Monolith - Silos of Infrastructure
At Globality we have about 120K lines of Terraform configuration that we use to manage our infrastructure. We manage everything we can this way. AWS, GitHub, CI, and more. We’re heavy users; we even go so far as to working with our patched version of Terraform while the official plugins catch up with us. For example, we recently moved a number of our AI classifiers to SageMaker, but the AWS provider didn’t support all of the configuration options we needed....