Employee Spotlight- Roy Berko-VP DevOps

The world of DevOps, which combines operations and development, is gaining momentum at a dizzying pace.

A lot of people want to be a part of it, get to know it, and become experts of the most desired technologies in the field.

Many people want to be promoted, succeed and make an impact in the company in which they work.

It is important to know that many times it is up to us – how much we really want it and how much we invest in it.

The Q&A below gives you a small taste of how Roy Berko, VP, DevOps in Engineering at DV, promoted the field of DevOps in the company from scratch through determination, professionalism, and a precise vision and strategy.

1. How long have you been working at DV?

I’ve been at DV for 10 years.

2. Can you tell us a little about your position and your team?

I’m the VP of DevOps in the Engineering department. In my role, I lead the DevOps group direction and architectural decisions with a focus on the company's business goals.  

I founded the DevOps group five years ago. The department did not exist before,and with the right vision and strategy I slowly made it what it is today. Currently, the group includes more than 20 DevOps engineers globally – in Israel, Europe and the US.

The DevOps group deals with three main areas:

1. Design and implement the CI/CD systems, tools, and processes to support the company SDLC.

A couple of years ago we decided to redesign our CI/CD process to better fit our vision of how SDLC processes need to be at DV. Which systems and tools will work best with our cloud and containerized application, and which will give our development team the ability to be as independent as possible. We decided to go with GitLab.com as our main DevOps platform.

2. DevOps platform systems -

We are container enthusiasts; we adore Kubernetes, Kafka and all of our monitoring areas based on Prometheus, Grafana and Loki. Our DevOps team is the owners of the platform systems and building a set of tools to help us work with those systems.

3. Cloud Operation -

Up until 5 years ago, DV applications and systems used to run on our colo data centers. Five years ago, we started our cloud journey with our social-integration products. We chose GCP back then since they offered the best managed system for our needs. The journey was successful and we managed to sign a contract with GCP to migrate most of our systems to GCP. The DevOps team is responsible for the cloud automation (we use Terraform for resources creation and management), networking and setup.

3. What was your first role at DV?

I have a bachelor's degree in Information System Engineering, and my background after the university was in .Net development. I was excited to join DV as a C# developer, working on the backend system that was responsible for processing data from the billions of ads we monitor per day. 

4. Can you walk us through some of the growth at DV that led you to your current position?

After a few years as a backend developer, I relocated to our main R&D hub in NYC. Over the next few years, I expanded my skills and worked on other projects like ETL, reporting, and development in Python, but I always felt passionate about management.

Since I was also working closely with our TechOps department, I received an offer to manage DV's operations team – a team of four engineers who supported our systems. I agreed to the offer, and in time I also added the first DevOps engineer to the team. He helped me identify that there is high potential and great importance to promoting the field in the company.

I was drawn to this world, declared the field as my own and started working on my strategy and advancing my vision. Soon enough, the group was divided into a DevOps unit and an Operations unit. I started managing both groups and recruited managers to join the team.

5. What made you want to work at DV when you first started?

When I started working at DV, I was drawn to the fact that the company had built a new world that was unparalleled at the time. Both the field and technology was very attractive to me, and I felt a good connection with the people and the management.

6. What tip would you give to people who would like to work as DevOps Engineers?

DevOps today is the hottest field, so it attracts a lot of people. Aside from the amazing DevOps tools/platform, you will need to make sure you understand the DevOps cultural philosophies and practices – since they are just as important as the tools.

 7. Why do you think the field is in such high demand today?

Companies understand today the importance of the DevOps culture and tools, and the affect the team has on the delivery of a company in speed, quality, and security. At the same time, DevOps Engineers who combine development with operations, specialize in containers, cloud, Prometheus, and Grafana are hard to find.

8. Which technology is a must for any DevOps Engineer to understand?

It is true that it is important to know the ecosystem of containers – how to build efficient monitoring systems, understand how the cloud works, and how important it is to automate resources in the cloud. However, what is more important, is the mindset and culture of the DevOps engineer. DevOps tools provide the means but they are not the end goal.