Facebook Release Engineering with Chuck Rossi

When Chuck Rossi joined Facebook in 2008, he was one of the most experienced release engineers at the company. As he began to explore the engineering practices of the organization, he was surprised, confused, and impressed by the release engineering system that he encountered.

Release engineering is the process by which software is released to users. As software is being developed, it moves through a series of testing environments. In these test environments, the software can be studied using simulated inputs that can help developers discover software bugs.

Chuck had come to Facebook from Google. At Google, the crown jewel was Google web search which had a regimented release process. At Facebook, the crown jewel was facebook.com. Chuck found that the release process for facebook.com was much different than Google web search.

Chuck joins the show to talk about release engineering at Facebook, and how the company constantly evolved its code deployment process. Chuck also describes Facebook’s pivot to mobile, and how the bottlenecks in the mobile app release process threatened Facebook’s ability to iterate and release quickly.

This show provided some amazing perspective on continuous delivery, and will be useful to anyone who is working on figuring out their “DevOps” process. Chuck has a wealth of knowledge and context about the modern software industry.

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Transcript

Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.