Microservice Scorecard Generator

In just twelve short months, the Technology department at Ibotta grew by over 100 people. Along with this growth, we started breaking down our monolithic Ruby on Rails application into a series of microservices, which caused a rapid increase in the number of GitHub projects, languages and frameworks squads use.

To keep technologists (engineers, data scientists and analysts) focused on business logic, two cross-functional squads were created focusing on introducing conventions, reducing boilerplate and making common use-cases work out-of-the-box with little configuration.

These squads started making great progress on “Paving the Road to Production” by introducing:

• Yeoman Generators for building new apps in common languages and frameworks
• Pipelines to provision, build and deploy services to AWS accounts and Kubernetes clusters
• Tools to encrypt and manage secrets
• Standardized libraries for logging, metrics and configuration

However, we had a difficult time documenting and communicating the available tools and best-practices as they evolved. Internal blog posts, Slack announcements, Confluence wiki documentation, and in-person training were tried, but they didn’t provide a long-term benefit.

To help mitigate this problem, I developed a scorecard to game-ify following best practices. The scorecard project proved to be a fun, effective way to emit information about the health of services as the company grows. It rolls up a plethora of information about each project and helps identify opportunities for maintenance work after services are in production.

Key Skills

• Scaleable Developer Tooling
• Internal Tools
• Microservices Best Practices
• Team Building
• Brigade

You can read all about this project on Medium.