Evolving Continuous Integration at Netflix (Elise McCallum)

Continuous integration as a practice has come to be virtually synonymous with the tools that enable it. As developer workflows grew increasingly diverse and complex, we saw the need to extend and support continuous integration beyond the commit/test/fix cycle. While our existing tooling generally worked for building commits and running suites of automated tests, we found that reliably building pull requests and simplifying the common cases while still supporting complex configurations still presented challenges.
Inspired by developer feedback and the friction we faced with our existing tooling, we began evolving our continuous integration strategy to focus on increasing velocity, simplifying builds, and providing a more integrated developer experience. This session will explore how we leveraged the best practices and opinions of other CI-first tools, fast feedback and requests from our engineers, and an iterative approach to begin building a new suite of tools to support a diverse set of workflows. We will also dive into the technical considerations and approach we are using to minimize configuration while enabling reliable, traceable builds integrated with our existing toolchain.
About the speaker:
As a senior software engineer on the Productivity Engineering team, Elise McCallum develops and supports the tools that enable continuous integration at Netflix. Elise has a deep interest in optimizing the development lifecycle and path to production to make delivering value as frictionless as possible. Prior to Netflix, Elise worked as a senior consultant at ThoughtWorks, helping companies to tackle challenges both technical and organizational.