SREcon19 Asia/Pacific - How (Not) to Scale a Project: A Post-Mortem

Giacomo Bagnoli, Facebook

This talk is a multi-year retrospective about a real life project, from the initial wins as a proof of concept to the challenges and problems of scaling it up that almost jeopardized it.

A network monitoring tool with initial promising results but that scaled too fast, too soon; how it got a lot of traction with the proof of concept but failed to scale and productionize it; how expectations got dis-aligned with results, and how the customer perceived it afterwards.

This is ultimately a success story on how applying best practices that "we all know" helped rectify a potentially bad situation. We'll go through the history of this project, and how applying such practices to customer communications, software design, system design, and operations excellence got it back on track.