New Relic : DAZN’s head of SRE on conquering instant releases

"10s, 100s, 1000s, it's all the same problem," Craig says. "I didn't walk into DAZN and snap my fingers and suddenly all this stuff sprang into life. This has taken years."

"Like any big problem, the trick is to break it down into manageable chunks. This is where microservices help," he says.

Craig's advice for getting over the fear of instant release is to pick a small service that has limited impact but visibility across the business. "Don't worry if you break it. Because you have a test environment, I hope-or a staging environment or a dev environment at the very least-you can test it in there and break it in there and roll it forward through the lifecycle until you get to production, and then get comfortable with the idea of releasing like that."

DAZN measures metrics across its tech stack-by embedding observability to show performance issues, from ideation to ticket delivery time-but it didn't start like that.

"The journey of a million miles starts with a single step. You have to take that first step. You have to get used to it. You have to build policies and practices and ideas and get your developers in that mindset of knowing that, 'well, this is a small thing, I can do a PR for this and it will automatically release itself once I tag it.'"

"If you want to build it, just try it. And then if you're going to observe it, don't worry about the epic tooling that's out there that does all this observability, worry about your golden signals. Worry about things like saturation, error rates, latency rate, that sort of thing. Just measure those things. Because you start there. You've got to start somewhere."