Interview: News UK, DevOps Excellence Awards finalist
The road to DevOps can be a rough one, as with any cultural change, but while some companies fail and sink at this stage, others embrace the change and succeed.
News UK is a finalist at the DevOps Excellence Awards, in the running for Best DevOps Team, and sits firmly among the latter firms. We talked to Atanas Dichev, principal engineer in News UK's Engineering Productivity team, about the work he and his colleagues have done to reach this stage.
Dichev's team of engineers is responsible for implementing and supporting DevOps principles and approaches in News UK, as well as setting up good practices for its cloud infrastructure and CI/CD. He is responsible for clarifying unclear technical requests with stakeholders and supporting teams to troubleshoot incidents across different virtual environments. He's especially proud of having the chance to see first-hand how big media sites like The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun move across major service platforms.
Computing: Who is News UK? What are you all about?
Atanas Dichev: NewsUK is the UK's largest media company, standing behind big titles like The Times & The Sunday Times, The Sun, The TLS, Virgin Radio and many more.
CTG: What makes News UK different from other technology companies?
AD: It's the unique combination of old and new - taking something this traditional and institutional, like The Times newspaper, and bringing it into the world of the latest technologies is something special. This blending is remarkable evidence of how outstanding our company is in the technology field.
CTG: What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?
AD: We're most proud of our latest big migration work in the CDN layer of our company products, moving all of our titles entirely from one CDN platform to another. We take major pride in this as a DevOps-oriented technology company because of the agility and hard work we put in and the strong will we displayed during the short time period we had to finish it. The thing that makes this so important for us is that it's tightly related to one of the most crucial parts of our products - the viewer satisfaction of content delivery.
CTG: What are you working on this year?
AD: As we continued optimising the CDN capabilities even further, we started another big project for the company - implementing a monitor tool for the four key DevOps metrics. This project should bring us to a state where we're able to monitor our engineering teams' velocity, performance and quality to help us improve as a technology company.
CTG: Why are events like the DevOps Excellence Awards important to the IT industry?
AD: Events like this are very important to the industry because it gives engineers and leaders the confidence and recognition they deserve, thus motivating them to achieve even greater accomplishments.
The DevOps Excellence Awards will take place on the 23rd March 2022 at The Montcalm, Marble Arch. Finalists can click here to book a table.