You’ve heard of DevOps, but have you heard about Pole Star’s newly formed Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team? They’re the brains bringing automation and efficiency to our engineering processes, while bridging the gap between our Devs and Operations teams.
Headed up by Pole Star’s VP, Head of DevOps & SRE, Ana Martins, the team is made up of five technically-minded problem solvers, and they’re about to make big changes to Pole Star’s software development process.
Ana says, “We’re really excited about establishing this new team. Our plans to build an underlying foundation platform for Devs and QA to use during development and deployments, as well as enhanced platform engineering, will massively improve our overall development efficiency and enable full transparency throughout our testing and release processes. This will truly accelerate and scale our production systems and, with work already underway, I’m really looking forward to seeing where our team can take Pole Star.”
The team’s mission is to develop high-quality, scalable applications at fast speed, while providing our developers and testers with the best work environment. To do this, they will focus on building code to replace manual development, release, and monitoring processes and create automations that will improve efficiency and reduce errors. Moreover, by improving our monitoring of production systems and automating incident detection and resolution, the resilience of our systems will also be increased.
“Coming from an operations background I have felt the pain of alarm fatigue and the manual nature of some processes. With the rest of the team I am really looking forward to improving the overall resilience of our systems, decreasing the number of incidents in production, and providing visibility to the health and performance of services across all applications and infrastructure. Can’t wait to get stuck in!” – Paolo Zeolla.
Ultimately, the team will enable Pole Star to provide our customers with the highest service performance and availability. This will be achieved by accelerating our software development programme, enabling us to build out and update our existing solutions even faster to keep our customers at the forefront of maritime insight with up-to-date vessel and risk intelligence.
“As an SRE team, our aim is to ensure that what we build “works as expected”. It needs to be reliable, available, and meet expectations whenever our users require it to. Such a mandate involves and requires a broad set of talent, experience, and battle-tested mindset, which this team has.” – Evans Mungai.
With the SRE team working behind the scenes, Pole Star can maintain and develop its position as the leader in maritime intelligence, while accelerating our maritime trade digitalisation, surveillance, and sustainability solutions.
“Having created the DevOps department within Pole Star in 2013, it’s now time to step up our efforts and expand into the SRE space. I’ve been at Pole Star since the beginning and what’s coming is really exciting – but it requires a re-engineering effort from the roots up, one that can only be achieved with a dedicated SRE team. With Ana heading up the expanded team, I can finally see SRE delivering a modern cutting-edge platform.” – Tim Durmush.