183 At this time of the year, we’re all thinking about what’s next (gym membership, call for papers) but we’re sipping some eggnog and recapping the highlights for Scality in 2019. Let’s get started with Gartner positioning Scality in the Leaders once again in the Magic Quadrant for Distributed File and Object Storage. They also awarded us high scores in their Critical Capabilities for Object Storage Report.Oh, and we got it twice this year, too. Then there’s the NAB award for Zenko as well as the multiple GigaOM Go Awards assigned in Key Criteria for Evaluating Enterprise Object Storage Report. Scality teams really brought it and our excellence is being recognized. Huzzah! We asked to some team members to share their thoughts on the year as it closes. Things to be happy about Scality turns 10! Yes, we celebrated one decade of operations in July: Cakes in every office, champagne flowed. (INSTAGRAM or pic for this one) And we released a new version of our flagship software. RING8 release A new tech train was released during the summer and is maturing fast towards our Long Term Release. RING8 ships with the eXtended Data Management feature which enables the most flexible hybrid-cloud storage system available on the market. MetalK8s 2.X release We rocked the release version 2.x of MetalK8s. This generation represents a complete redesign of our Kubernetes open-source distribution in order to better address customer needs and the requirements of our next generation RING product line. MetalK8s version 2 comes with faster deployment times, newer versions of Kubernetes, a new user interface, lower hardware requirements, improved performance and all the tools that make system administrators happy. All future Zenko or XDM deployments will be using MetalK8s 2.4.2 or higher, drastically simplifying migration to upcoming generations of RING. Engineering team breaks into squads and chapters The Engineering team moved to “squad and chapter” development organization to provide developers more independence. The model was popularized by Spotify as a tweak to the SCRUM model, which broke after their engineering teams supersized. These videos (part 1 and part 2) give a nice overview of how the model of squads and chapters focus on agility rather than follow the strict dictates of SCRUM. UX study paves way for new UI We want to make our next generation product more effective and intuitive for users by improving the user experience. So we hired some UX experts to help us achieve this goal, working alongside the Product Team, through three steps: Audit: Interview 10 customers, analyze their feedback on the current UI to focus their needs Co-creation: Develop the new UI/UX prototype of our next generation product Evaluate: Determine whether the new interface meets customer expectations through 1-hour test interviews with 10 customers The feedback was really good! We’re on track to deliver this new UI in 2020. Marketing team launches new websites, and adopts new marketing tools Scality.com came into the new year wearing the same old site (check for yourself). We shook things up with a new look and feel for the brand, supported by a refreshed website structure and debuted SOLVED magazine, covering topics like open-source licensing, storage industry news and management. On the marketing tooling side, we adopted Mautic. For a company whose products are built on open source, it made sense to adopt an enterprise open-source tool. The acquisition of Mautic by Acquia confirmed that we picked a solid solution with great potential. Struggles and solutions The release engineering team fought a bug in Kubernetes affecting our CI (connection reset). Our team took a deep dive, reported it to Google with a reproducer, fixed and deployed. We shared all the gory details in this blog post. The Technical Publications team switched fully from Madcap to a Docs Like Code system based on Sphinx and the Git workflow. This sea change required the group to learn new tools while gaining agility. Lots of enthusiasm for the switch powered them through the inevitable small setbacks, and now there’s only smooth sailing. By the way, the team is hiring! There are lots more reasons to be happy at Scality like mountain climbing, epic runs, walks in the desert and wonderful meals… we couldn’t list them all! We wish everyone happy holidays and a solid start of the new decade (or maybe 2020 is the last year of the decade, we’re still debating)! https://solvedscal.wpengine.com/solved/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/12/2019-Holidays-Draft-8.m4v
