“I Own What, Now?” Our Journey from a Managed Monolith to Engineers Owning Their Services

Four years ago, Redfin ran a monolith with a centralized ops team. Faced with a need to migrate to the cloud and a desire to enable engineers to move faster and build more robust systems, we started a journey to change our culture and how we work. Today, teams build and run their own services, while developers are still able to focus 70% of their time on new feature development—now that's sweet! We may have made it to the land of milk and honey, but it wasn’t easy. This honest talk will cover the steps, missteps, navigating cultural changes, and the places we wish we would have gone as our developers became responsible for production systems.

Join us and learn how Redfin managed our transition to empowered service teams. We’ll share approaches and lessons learned as we reduced operational load across teams, developed tools to track where we spent our time, and built a framework for teams to monitor their costs using Datadog.