ApacheCon NA 2015

Systems at an enterprise level have a reputation for complexity and fragility beyond the ken of mere mortals. As systems age their tech debts fade into history, the assignment of roles and responsibilities ossify, and business deal optimizations accumulate into Lovecraftian nightmares. Customers of these systems often end up unable to get new features or integrations added due to conflicts with the owning silo's priorities or their fear of catastrophic failure.

Using the principles of Open Source development has enabled PayPal to begin moving large scale systems development from a defensive and risk averse culture to one of flexibility and collaboration. This session will look at the pressures propping up the silos, explore one of the cases where we were able to break down the silo without breaking the system, and discuss some of the surprises that we found along the way.