Often, infrastructure is viewed as the technology or the servers hosting and supporting applications. At WHOOP, infrastructure aims to support, unify, and accelerate product development. Here is how we view the impact of infrastructure development.
Creating Leverage
Infrastructure is the fulcrum on which we leverage product development. Our infrastructure teams constantly seek to reduce the complexity it takes to develop features and product, whether building a real-time data consumer utilizing Kafka or a batch analytical job on top of Cassandra. Reducing the effort of creating and maintaining applications on otherwise complex systems lowers the overall barrier to entry to building state-of-the-art features.
By eliminating much of the operational overhead associated with the technologies used to build applications, development teams are free to focus all their efforts on what matters: building features and delivering value to our customers.
Investing in leverage of this caliber allows us to accelerate product development and individual career advancement as the business grows.
Streamlining Product Development
Infrastructure teams build and continuously refine our application tool belt by improving boilerplate and common code. We aim to deliver proven and tested base code that developers can utilize for any application type. This eliminates the effort it takes to rebuild common functionality each time a new feature comes about, allowing developers to focus on product requirements rather than how to surface a health check or monitor a SQL query. As a result, the business can reliably release new features to customers as quickly as possible.
Infrastructure teams look to standardize code across teams so that we can build tools that aid all developers no matter what product team you are working on. For example, health checks are the same across all applications at WHOOP so that our infrastructure can automatically detect an issue with any application. If teams implemented their own health checks in different manners, then we would introduce additional cognitive load and lose the leverage provided by our tooling.
First Class Development Tooling
As a part of our ownership principle at WHOOP, developers are responsible for their code from inception to customer impact and everything in between. Infrastructure teams are always refining the development lifecycle with tooling to make each development lifecycle stage a first-class experience.
Some of these tools help you avoid potential runtime bugs earlier in the development cycle and some help you deploy your applications on infrastructure like Kubernetes or Google Play. All tooling developed in one way or another brings transparency, speed, and automation to your fingertips. When this tooling is widely used across all teams, the time a tool saves a single developer is multiplied across all developers. As a result, we can focus our time and efforts in nimble fashion that a fast-paced business demands.
If you want to build infrastructure at WHOOP, check out our open positions.