From 100 Pipelines to 1 • Bhavik Gudka • GOTO 2023

Capital One's journey from hundreds of pipelines to one standardized ecosystem, improving collaboration, speed, and developer empowerment while reducing pipeline complexity and bugs.

Key takeaways
  • The speaker’s company, Capital One, used to have hundreds of pipelines across various teams, resulting in inconsistencies and difficulties in measuring standards compliance.
  • As the company moved towards a single ecosystem, they standardized their SDLC and reduced the number of pipelines to just a few.
  • This allowed them to measure and enforce standards across the company, which was previously difficult.
  • The speaker’s team at Capital One used a “You Build You Own” (YBYO) approach, where developers owned the testing and deployment of their code, but this led to inconsistencies and difficulties in scaling.
  • To solve this, the speaker’s team created a central pipeline ecosystem that all teams used, which allowed for easier standardization and enforcement of standards.
  • The benefits of this approach included:
    • Reduced pipeline complexity
    • Increased speed of development and deployment
    • Improved collaboration across teams
    • Easier standardization and enforcement of standards
    • Increased developer empowerment and autonomy
  • The speaker’s team also implemented a workflow that allowed for peer review, testing, and deployment of code in a centralized manner.
  • This approach allowed the company to move faster and reduce the number of deployments, while also improving quality and reducing the number of bugs.
  • The speaker’s team also used automation to speed up the pipeline, which allowed them to focus on more strategic tasks.
  • The speaker’s current company, Capital One, has over 10,000 engineers and uses a variety of tools and technologies, and the speaker’s team is responsible for maintaining the central pipeline ecosystem.
  • The speaker’s team is constantly looking for ways to improve the pipeline and make it more efficient and effective.
  • The speaker is passionate about DevOps and has been involved in various transformations and innovations throughout his career.