Meet Booz Allen Chief Engineer Steven Terrana

Each year, The Cloud Awards recognize industry leaders, innovators, and organizational transformation in cloud computing worldwide. In February, Booz Allen won the Cloud Development Innovation of the Year award for 2021-2022.

The prize celebrates Booz Allen’s ground-breaking Solutions Delivery Platform (SDP), which reduces software development time from up to nine months to less than a day. Behind SDP is Chief Engineer Steven Terrana, one of a team of engineers who transformed a spark of an idea into SDP, currently the only Pipeline-as-a-Service tool that enables federal agencies to scale software factories across multiple teams to accelerate their modernization efforts.

Terrana began his career, and his journey in cloud innovation, at the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied mechanical and biomedical engineering and taught programming and robotics to children.

“There’s something appealing about software development,” he said. “To take an idea and bring it to life through code has always been a passion of mine.”

This passion led Terrana to a DevOps position as chief architect, leading a team building large-scale software factories. “As a DevSecOps engineer, you bridge the gap between organizational silos and work with all kinds of new technologies. You bring all these pieces together to make software modernization real,” he said.

At Booz Allen, he continued to hone his skills in continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines as well as containerization and microservice-based application architecture. 

“It’s a different way of thinking and working when developers you’ve never met will need to be able to use what you’ve built. Everything changes when you’re building something for other developers,” Terrana explained.

DevSecOps gave organizations across industries the ability to accelerate the delivery of new features. Yet IT teams, particularly in the federal space, still grappled with significant challenges: how to scale DevSecOps best practices, standardize quality across local teams, and ensure continuous security. 

Booz Allen set out to transform the paradigm. “At Booz Allen, we had a unique vantage point to see the patterns emerging in DevSecOps that led to the ideas behind SDP,” Terrana said.

With a traditional DevSecOps approach, individual teams used repetitive tasks to build similar pipelines, a process that often took months. Booz Allen distilled development teams’ most common processes and created a reusable, flexible, and standardized pipeline prototype. The team tested the idea with a client, then transitioned it into the SDP. 

Today, SDP allows developers to get software delivery up and running in mere hours. Quality and security metrics are automated, agencies have access to continuous delivery, and skilled engineers can focus more of their time on high-value work. To further enable strong adoption, innovation, and collaboration, Booz Allen open-sourced SDP, enabling everyone in the developer community to deploy and contribute to SDP at no cost. 

“It’s not enough to provide technical solutions, you need to lower the barrier to entry and empower teams to be self-sufficient,” he said. “We’ve succeeded at Booz Allen supporting our clients in DevSecOps adoption because of our appreciation for the cultural aspects of the transformation. 

“It’s been an adventure, being on the cutting edge of open source at Booz Allen,” Terrana said.

Learn more about careers at Booz Allen and Booz Allen’s cloud solutions.