maturing the startup

Copyright © 2015 FlightStats, Inc.

Maturing the Startup

Using New Relic Insights to make data driven decisions that maintain the startup mojo while decreasing startup debt at FlightStats

Chad Berkley @FlightStatsTech


Who is FlightStats?

FlightStats is the leading provider of global real time flight status data.


Scale

Every week, we process...

~25M Web & Mobile

Requests

~5M Flight Alerts

~70M

Aircraft Positions

~50M

API Requests

~7M Flight

Events

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Who Are We?

FlightStats is a data company.

And it’s an awesome place to work. Great people, fun work environment,

interesting data and problem set.

After 14 years running in startup mode, we’d accumulated a significant

amount of technical debt.


Growing Pains

14+ years of startup culture lead to two major barriers to the continued growth of the company:

Social TechnicalOverlapping and

misaligned teams with lots of

interdependencies sharing one large code

base.

Monolithic codebase running in an enterprise container powered by

an overly complex relational database with patchy monitoring and

alerting.


Problem

How can we keep the fast-paced, agile, startup-like environment while maturing and scaling the company?


Startup Mode Technical Debt


Late Nights


Microservice Migration


Requirements

● Easy to deploy with minimal code changes

● Little or no bootstrap configuration

● Full stack

● I want a dashboard!

4 Simple Requirements


APM


Social Changes

● Align teams around products, not verticals

● Minimize inter-team dependencies

● Many smaller Git repositories

● Teams set their own priorities and business and technical goals

● Small teams pivot quickly

Product teams need good data to make good decisions!


Mantra

Measure Everything.

Make all data accessible to everyone.


Insights

Summer 2014 we’re introduced to:


Dashboardification


Data Aplenty

So, we have a ton of data. Now what?


Insights Applications

Let’s start making data driven decisions.


Scraper Detection


Assumption Busting


Data Acquisition


Alerting on Insights Data


Measuring Team Costs - Compute


Measuring Team Costs - Storage


Questions and Answers

How can we keep the fast-paced, agile, startup-like environment while maturing and scaling the company?

Good Data == Good Decisions


D

Chad Berkley

[email protected]

@FlightStatsTech

Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay!

- Sherlock Holmes

maturing the startup

Data & Analytics