We all think DevOps is a better way to work, but how can you begin to measure aspects of your DevOps transformation. In this episode we talk to Adam Auerbach and Topo Pal of Capital One, and learn more about the work they are doing. We discuss how their DevOps journey started, how it’s now a CIO mandated journey, and how they build some open source tooling to help them measure the speed at which they are moving.
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Show Notes:
Capital One DevOps Dashboard – Hygiea
15 principles of CD (mostly binary, used to create heatmap of maturity for Capital One platforms)
- Github (or similar) with branching strategy
- Code Coverage (90% preferred, at business discretion)
- Static Analysis (e.g. PMD, CPD, FindBugs)
- Static Security
- Open Source/third party vulnerability scan/support
- Automated instance provisioning in each region
- Immutable servers
- Artifact management
- Automated build, deploy, and testing on commit (can be by feature)
- Automated integration testing on successful test
- Automated performance testing
- Automated/repeatable rollbacks (including data migrations)
- Push button/automated deployments to production
- Automated generation of COs
- Blue/green (zero downtime/canary) releases
- Feature activation (wire on/wire off)
Adam Auerbach – Twitter – LinkedIn
Adam Auerbach is the Sr Technology Director for Advanced Testing and Release services for Capital One Financial Corporation. Adam is responsible for Capital One’s enterprise performance and automated testing departments as well as enterprise release management. Since joining Capital One, he has provided leadership for the agile transformation of their quality assurance group and led the enterprise adoption of DevOps and ATDD. Before joining Capital One, Adam was with Chase and other financial and insurance companies, in various leadership positions focusing on quality and agile practices.
Tapabrata Pal (Topo) – Twitter – LinkedIn
Tapabrata Pal has 20 years of IT experience in various technology roles (developer, operations engineer, and architect) in the retail, healthcare, and finance industries. Over the last five years, Tapabrata has served as director of Capital One’s Enterprise Architecture group, and led the company’s DevOpsSec initiatives. He is currently director and individual contributor focusing on next-generation infrastructure. Tapabrata is also the community manager and a core committer of an Open Source project “Hygieia” that won “Open Source Rookie of the Year” for 2015.
Previously, Tapabrata spent some time in academics doing doctoral and post-doctoral research in the field of solid state physics.

last 18 years. While still attending the University of Washington, where I was studying Computer Science, I started doing web development building web pages and light weight ASP applications. right after college I joined Microsoft where I stayed for 16 years. While there I was exposed to many different Software Engineering Methodologies, primarily agile, and worked on a number of Products and Services from Web to Desktop and built a broad base of experience across stacks. In 2005, I began my evolution with agile, receiving my certification as a Scrum Master and went on to run and facilitate a number of agile Teams. My passions are in Services and Distributed Systems as well as Mathematics.