Gartner identifies “software-defined anything (SDx)” as one of the top 10 strategic technologies of 2014. SDx is a driven by the need for automation in cloud computing, DevOps and infrastructure provisioning. For DevOps, creating resilient software and delivering new features quickly is supported by automating testing, deployment and maintenance. Tools that deliver automation help with friction-less delivery and aggressive innovation. Inkling, a platform for interactive ebooks for smart learning, has transitioned their software development model to DevOps with the help technologies that propelled cultural change.

As with many cultural shifts, Inkling’s transformation to a DevOps strategy didn’t happen overnight. Inking was growing exponentially and needed to deliver a reliable platform to meet customer SLAs. With the help of monitoring tools, they were able to automate the detection of issues in their IT infrastructure. Alerts from these monitoring tools caused issues because they were coming in from all sides and sent to everyone on the team, rather than the subject matter expert. To reduce alerting noise, they needed to centralize alerts and route them to the right engineer to resolve the issue.

As the engineering team grew, the DevOps team wanted to add more people to the on-call rotation to fairly share the responsibility. They preferred to centrally manage on-call schedules without impacting their monitoring applications’ settings every time they needed to make a change.

Inkling turned to PagerDuty to automate their incident management. With PagerDuty, Inkling’s on-call schedule is now automated, so there is no need to constantly maintain it. Alerts are also routed to the correct individual and automatically escalated to others if needed.

“PagerDuty is essential to our DevOps strategy.” – Aashay Desai, DevOps

Inkling’s shift to a DevOps model has helped them deliver a highly reliable service, making it easier for companies to move their publishing models to a mobile-first, digital-first model. Today, Inkling Habitat a cloud based, scalable SaaS platform for building beautiful, interactive content is used by the top publishers in the world.

Read Inkling’s full story to learn more about their DevOps culture shift.