How Dell Technologies uses GitHub

Dell Technologies, headquartered in Round Rock, Texas, is a technology company with more than 10,000 software developers in its Infrastructure Services Group. These developers build PowerMax, PowerStore, and PowerScale storage systems, firmware for PowerEdge servers, and other products.

Standardizing on a single platform

Many of Dell's developers joined through acquisitions, including the 2016 purchase of EMC. This resulted in teams using a wide variety of development tools. Over the past year, Dell's TechOps team has worked to standardize and streamline the software and methodologies used across the company.

After evaluating multiple version control and collaboration tools, Dell decided to standardize on GitHub, which was already used by many teams. According to Senior Distinguished Engineer Karl Owen, "It's more efficient for the company to use one set of tools from a licensing and support perspective. It's more efficient for the developers, because you eliminate the need to learn a whole new set of tools if you move from one project or team to another."

Why GitHub

GitHub proved to be a good fit for Dell's development philosophy. DevOps Architect Bob Ballantyne explains: "I had an epiphany a while back that merging a pull request is a bit like executing a contract. It's an agreement that a piece of code is stable, that it's passed a certain set of evaluations, and is ready to move from one location to another."

GitHub's roadmap also aligned well with Dell's own plans. Equally important, it's what their developers want to use. "GitHub is an industry leader," Owen says. "People come to Dell already knowing how to use it, which is pretty significant. It's a big contributor to developer happiness."

Results

Standardizing on GitHub has already made a measurable difference. "GitHub enables speed and scale," Owen says. "We can work on bigger projects and finish them faster." The ability to integrate many different third-party code evaluation tools also helps Dell write better code.

Open source and innersource

GitHub is central to Dell's open source work. The company's developers contribute to many open source projects. "It's good for business," Owen says. "We want to make sure people can use our products. For example, we want our storage technologies to work with OpenStack." Open source is also a great way to recruit new employees.

Beyond business benefits, Ballantyne notes: "We consume a lot of open source and it would be very selfish to just be a consumer. So we like to contribute back."

Dell also embraces innersource practices. With more than 10,000 developers in the Infrastructure Solutions Group, employees have solved a wide range of difficult computing problems. GitHub makes it easier to share this work across the company, enabling code reuse. "We're migrating more code into our internal GitHub instance to make it more like the external GitHub," Ballantyne says. "Now, people can find and leverage useful libraries and software that other people in the company have made."

Analytics and troubleshooting

GitHub's API is central to how Dell manages and analyzes its computing environment. The TechOps team uses a webhook to pipe GitHub activity into Apache Kafka, where every commit and pull request is recorded. "We can do lots of reporting from there," Owen explains. "We created dashboards to show how much activity there is, what sorts of errors there are."

This data is also useful for troubleshooting. Dell's Kafka cluster contains a wealth of information that makes it possible to recreate entire sequences of events. Distinguished Member of Technical Staff Bob Bell describes an example: while troubleshooting a microservice, the team noticed it had posted a comment to GitHub that had been deleted. "I thought, 'if only we could only have the text of what that comment was,'" Bell says. "And it turned out it was saved in Kafka."

Looking ahead

Dell is being proactive in adopting and evaluating new GitHub features. "GitHub isn't just a version control system for us, it's a platform that lets us build the experiences we need," Bell says. The TechOps team is looking forward to automating more workflows using GitHub Actions. "Even if Actions only saves, say, 15 minutes, if you multiply that by 10,000 developers, that's a huge amount of time saved," Owen says.

"We want to follow industry leading practices and reduce friction," Owen concludes. "GitHub helps us achieve both of those things."