{"id":9092,"date":"2015-06-01T11:00:58","date_gmt":"2015-06-01T16:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/?p=9092"},"modified":"2021-11-18T21:45:49","modified_gmt":"2021-11-19T03:45:49","slug":"devops-at-wp-engine-an-inside-look","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/resources\/devops-at-wp-engine-an-inside-look\/","title":{"rendered":"DevOps At WP Engine: An Inside Look"},"content":{"rendered":"

After talking with a few folks about what DevOps means here at WP Engine, I realized that there isn\u2019t much out there about our DevOps team and its responsibilities. One of the first few questions that\u2019s asked in most DevOps interviews, at least as far as I\u2019ve seen, is: \u201cWhat does DevOps mean to you?\u201d Here, I\u2019ll do my best to answer what DevOps means at WP Engine.<\/p>\n

What does DevOps mean at WP Engine?<\/h2>\n

DevOps at WP Engine differs from what other companies define as DevOps, and in some ways it can differ greatly. I can speak to this firsthand based purely on what our expectations have been versus what the expectations have been for some of our candidates. WP Engine DevOps is defined as the culmination of the two departments (development and operations) that make up the word \u201cDevOps.\u201d It\u2019s not just fluffy unicorns and culture (though, our culture is amazing, and there may be a fluffy unicorn sighting every now and then). There is an expectation that a WP Engine DevOps Engineer possesses knowledge about the development lifecycle as well as a deep understanding of system internals and architectural design. You don\u2019t have to be a rock star at all of the above, but it certainly doesn\u2019t hurt!<\/p>\n

What does a day in the life of a DevOps Engineer look like at WP Engine?<\/h2>\n

To be honest, it can vary day-to-day, but typically we have large projects that can span anywhere from a single week worth of work to several months, and range in complexity and type. For example, our DevOps team has worked on mass migration tooling built to seamlessly move customer environments off legacy architecture to the new hotness architecture, as well as the implementation of our high availability (active\/passive and Mercury active\/active<\/a>) offerings, among many other things.<\/p>\n

As some of you may know, WP Engine uses Ansible<\/a> for deploys and configuration management. As such, there\u2019s also a significant amount of development work that\u2019s done in Python, specifically around new environment provisioning, automated patching, and automate our deploys with Ansible. It may come as a surprise, but our DevOps Engineers are not too frequently involved directly with PHP and WordPress.<\/p>\n

What is the work-life balance like?<\/h2>\n

We are very fortunate to work with managers who fully understand the importance of establishing boundaries between a work life and personal life. If you start to feel strained, it\u2019s perfectly acceptable to discuss ways to mitigate the pressures of the situation.<\/p>\n

What is the server environment like?<\/h2>\n

Some of the folks I talk to are surprised at how many servers we have. We are lucky enough to work for a company that has been able to deploy WordPress at scale, and our server environment helps to prove that. Our server farm consists of thousands of servers. One side-effect of large server farms is that issues that occur with rarity occur more frequently and in more interesting ways than much smaller server environments.<\/p>\n

Okay, this sounds awesome. Are there other benefits?<\/h2>\n

On top of working on interesting issues with a great team, WP Engine provides several other excellent benefits to its employees.<\/p>\n