"Move fast and break things" was the mantra of the 2010s. In the 2020s, that's just a recipe for churn and outages. At NotionEdge, we operate under a different philosophy: "Move fast and verify everything." Here's how we built a DevOps culture that allows us to ship to production 15 times a day with zero downtime.
The False Dichotomy: Speed vs. Stability
Shipping features quickly is often seen as a tradeoff with stability. The common belief is that if you want reliable software, you need long release cycles, manual QA teams, and "freeze periods."
We refused to accept this dichotomy. Our data showed the opposite: smaller, more frequent releases actually reduce risk. When you deploy 100 lines of code, debugging a regression is trivial. When you deploy 10,000 lines once a month, finding a bug is like looking for a needle in a haystack of needles.
The Pipeline: From Commit to Production in 15 Minutes
Our "Golden Path" to production is fully automated. Here is what happens when a developer pushes a commit:
- Unit Tests (2 min): 10,000+ tests run in parallel using a distributed build cache.
- Static Analysis (1 min): Security scanning (SAST), linting, and dependency checks.
- Ephemetral Environment (4 min): A full clone of our infra is spun up for this specific branch.
- Integration Tests (5 min): Headless browsers simulate user flows (Cypress/Playwright).
- Canary Deploy (3 min): Traffic is gradually shifted to the new version (1% -> 10% -> 100%).
Feature Flags: Decoupling Deploy from Release
Deploying code is not the same as releasing a feature. We wrap every new capability in a Feature Flag. This allows us to merge code into `main` constantly, even if the feature isn't finished.
It also gives us a "Kill Switch." If a new feature causes a performance regression, we don't roll back the code; we just toggle the flag off. This takes seconds, not minutes.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
We treat our infrastructure exactly like our application code. Every server, load balancer, and database is defined in Terraform. There are no "manual changes" allowed in the AWS console.
This ensures that our environments are identical. We don't have "it works on my machine" problems because "my machine" is provisioned with the same scripts as production.
Culture of Ownership: You Build It, You Run It
Tools are only half the story. The most important part of our DevOps transformation was cultural. We fostered a culture where developers own their code from local development all the way to production monitoring.
We don't have a separate "Ops Team" that cleans up after developers. If your service goes down at 3 AM, you get paged. This creates a powerful incentive to write reliable, observable code.
Observability: Debugging with Data
You can't fix what you can't see. We instrument every service with OpenTelemetry. We don't just log "errors"; we log "events."
High-cardinality tracing allows us to ask questions like "Show me all 500 errors for User ID 12345 in the last 10 minutes." This capability turns "debugging" from a guessing game into a science.
Conclusion
DevOps is a journey, not a destination. We are constantly tweaking our pipelines, adopting new tools, and learning from our incidents. But one thing remains constant: our commitment to speed and quality.