OpsLevel: Service Ownership Platform with John Laban and Kenneth Rose

Microservices are built to scale. But as a microservices-based system grows, so does the operational overhead to manage it. Even the most senior engineers can’t be familiar with every detail of dozens- perhaps hundreds- of services. While smaller teams may track information about their microservices via spreadsheets, wikis, or other more traditional documentation, these methods often prove unsuitable for the unique demands of a sprawling microservices system. 

A microservices catalog is a solution to this problem. A microservices catalog seeks to centralize information about the services in your software architecture, including the purpose of a service, its owner, and instructions for using it. A microservices catalog can also provide a centralized source of knowledge about a system, which can help on-call engineers diagnose issues and also provide resources for onboarding new team members. Larger companies sometimes devote significant internal resources toward developing in-house microservices catalogs, while smaller organizations may not have the resources at their disposal to do so. OpsLevel’s founders recognized that many teams were re-inventing the wheel building internal microservices catalogs, and set out to design a toolset that could meet the needs of users of all sizes.

OpsLevel’s team has drawn from extensive experience working with industry leaders in DevOps to create a comprehensive toolset for managing microservices infrastructure. OpsLevel provides a “single pane of glass for operations,” integrating with a variety of tools such as Slack, git, CI/CD, incident management, and deployment systems. 

John Laban and Kenneth Rose are the co-founders of OpsLevel. Before John and Kenneth founded OpsLevel they worked together at PagerDuty, where John was the first engineer on the team. Kenneth, OpsLevel’s CTO, was also previously a senior developer at Shopify. John and Kenneth join the show today to talk about how OpsLevel can help developers manage their microservices better, and even transform how their team does DevOps.

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Transcript

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