How Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Went from Months to Minutes for Infrastructure Delivery
summary
Company moves from months or years to minutes for provisioning by building a shared platform called Bedrock that runs Apache Mesos and Apache Aurora, backed by Terraform, Vault, Linkerd, Jenkins and Datadog. A five‑person core team enables about 30 teams across 400–600 engineers to deploy from a single prod‑grade environment, handling a portfolio of ~900 apps, cutting annual costs by six figures. Cultural change takes ~two years; databases stay mostly RDS, Elasticsearch scaling hits 50,000+ shards and remains a pain.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:00Research
- 1:53The Problem
- 6:12Continuous Delivery
- 7:54The Catch
- 9:15TheGrassroots
- 9:56Behavioral Design
- 10:36Mesa Aurora
- 15:12Cloud Formation
- 16:08Jenkins
- 17:27Behavior Design
- 21:17Time for Questions
- 22:46Management Change
- 25:37Persistence
- 29:15Database
- 31:12Education
- 35:51The disconnect
- 38:14Challenges
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