Now on DevOps Radio: EA's Dan Roston Doesn’t Play Games When It Comes to DevOps

The latest episode of DevOps Radio features guest host CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey with Dan Roston , software engineer at Electronic Arts (EA) . Dan describes the benefits DevOps has brought to this global entertainment software company and, ultimately, to the millions of passionate gamers that have an insatiable appetite for more features and more fun. And yes, Dan has worked on some of EA’s most popular games, including FIFA, Frostbite and Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Ware.

Dan is part of a centralized DevOps group that services teams around the world. In this episode, you’ll also get a sense of the massive scale that exists at EA and how Dan and the team handle it all. "All" includes 3,000 virtual machines just for building, 72 Jenkins controllers orchestrating all the work and "a whole bunch of virtual machines" hosting internal services for routine tasks. Dan says: "Our sole goal is to find bugs, and QA should just be testing to see how fun the game is. They shouldn't be doing the edge case tests."

Looking for cheat codes? Well, Dan says that EA has implemented extra security tooling to make that tougher. Thanks to EA’s DevOps culture and processes, the team is always ready to release each game and ensure security. That’s a critical dependency, as game delivery deadlines are strict around release dates when millions of gamers clamor to get their hands on their controllers without a moment to spare.

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