KakaoPay's One-Year Retrospective on Deployment Efficiency: Automation Adoption and Team Productivity Gains

The RE Part of KakaoPay's SRE team pursued deployment process automation to address inefficiencies caused by manual work and lack of notifications. By automating deployment task assignment and status-change notifications via Slackbot, they significantly reduced operational burden.

As a result of introducing automation, the number of staff on standing deployment duty dropped from 10 to 3, and the freed-up resources were used to carry out various projects such as improving the monitoring system, building a Mocking Platform, and automating tests.

In addition, by hiring assistants to offload simple repetitive tasks, the team increased productivity, achieving an outcome of increasing the average monthly deployment support count from 1,000 to 1,500, about a 50% increase. This also secured consistency in deployment environments across services.

However, challenges were also identified during assistant operations, including confusion over ground rules, weakened motivation for process improvement, and insufficient quantitative data collection prior to improvements. To address these, the team continues regular reviews and data-driven metric tracking.