«How Kolesa works» - people and teams, processes, infrastructure

Ilya Stekolnikov, Information Technology Director Kolesa.kz

The Kolesa Group is one of the largest systems in Kazakhstan, helping 11 million residents to buy and sell cars, apartments and many other things every day. The ecosystem of the Kolesa Group includes many applications, such as "Kolesa" - the largest car resource and the No. 1 application in Kazakhstan, "Krysha" - the largest database of ads, analytics and information, "Market" - a free bulletin board for searching for goods or services, as well as "Kolesa car credit" - a unique online service car purchases on credit, "IAgent" - a professional tool for realtors and real estate agencies, "Avtoelon.uz " - a product for buying and selling cars in Uzbekistan. At the moment, the company employs more than 40,000 people, and 70% of them are engaged in software development.

As our planet stands on the "three whales", so the Kolesa Group adheres to its own specific principles of the "turquoise" level. What does it include? First of all, it is the openness of employees, freedom in the corporate culture, comfortable organization of the workspace, division into teams and mentoring. There are also no penalties in the company.

One of the important departments in the company is the development department, which includes about 160 people. All of them are divided into 18 teams, where each does its own thing depending on the product. The mission of the department is to quickly deliver high-quality, reliable and safe products that are valuable to the user, continuously optimizing processes, architecture and infrastructure. So who is part of these teams to carry out such a difficult job? Namely: BA, team leader, QA, Dev backend, Dev fronted, manager and UI. The teams are completely independent and work by themselves. This is possible due to the fact that they all use the same SRE infrastructure. It is these people who make sure that the mechanism works and does not stop, solve various staff problems.

The wheels use a matrix control structure. What is it? There are classic teams, all with different numbers of people, and there are a different number of projects that involve the interaction of certain people from different teams. Each project has its own manager, and people have their own manager in departments. Thus, a certain matrix is obtained.

A few words about the infrastructure - the main information is located in the Data centers in Almaty, one of which is the main one, but there are also 2 more backup ones. In particular, the company partially uses cloud services such as Google BigQuery and Yandex Cloud. Wheels use their own content delivery network. Since the main product is photos that should be displayed quickly. So how did the company arrange it? The main content is located in Almaty, but in other cities, the Wheel uses servers with a large number of AZU, which keep constantly warmed-up photos in themselves, allowing the user to quickly view any number of ads immediately.

Speaking of processes within the company, this is Jira Software. Wheels use it for internal processes, allowing you to do almost everything remotely. The company uses Gafana to monitor all processes. The main messenger is Telegram, all systems are integrated there, since there is a KPI there.

So what have the Wheels achieved using these control systems and not only? The average TTM is 50 hours per task. On average, the company closes 951 tasks per month, 43 releases per day. CFU-99.8, SLA-99.9.