Program

Design reviews are the foundation for a successful product or feature launch. In this session we will broach a few of the critical questions an SRE asks during the design review process to ensure the design and deployment will result in a sustainable system. We will cover real world examples of the pitfalls of not engaging the operations/infrastructure team early in the process.

Mandi Walls is Technical Practice Manager at Chef. For Chef, she travels the world helping organizations increase their effectiveness using configuration management and modernizing IT practices. Prior to joining Chef, she ran large web properties for AOL, including AOL.com, Games.com and Moviefone. Mandi has a Master's degree in Computer Science from George Washington University and an M.B.A. from UNC Kenan-Flagler. She is a regular speaker at technical conferences and is the author of Building a DevOps Culture, published by O'Reilly.

A product’s ability to release quickly can be critical to its success of exceeding the expectations of its users. In the current environment there is more and more pressure to speed up a team’s release cycle and the SRE and Release Team are innovating to meet this demand. Hear from some experts of some of the challenges they’ve had to overcome and the success they’ve found in the process.

Chuck Rossi leads Release Engineering at Facebook and started as Facebook's first release engineer in 2008. He manages both the web frontend releases (facebook.com: updated twice a day, every day) and the iOS and Android products (the #1 mobile application on both platforms). Chuck has worked as a software engineer for over 20 years and has held software engineering and release positions at IBM Almaden Research, Silicon Graphics, VMware, and Google. Chuck holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Daniel Schauenberg is a Senior Software Engineer at Etsy's infrastructure and development tools team. Automation, documentation and simplicity are his usual tools for improving the status quo. He previously worked in systems and network administration, on connecting chemical plants to IT systems, and as an embedded systems networking engineer. Things he thoroughly enjoys when not writing code include coffee, breakfast, TV shows, and basketball.

Long-term site stability requires a fundamental shift in perspective: planning for the future vs reacting to catastrophe. Whether it's growing a food festival from 1,500 attendees to 11,000, or dramatically increasing the scale of your production operations, it can be hard to foster acceptance of a new approach while soothing fears about cultural change. In this talk, Connie-Lynne will discuss the techniques of consensus-building, team autonomy, and fast failure she learned while running the Grilled Cheese Invitational, and how she transferred those to her work in Site Reliability Engineering.

Connie-Lynne joined Groupon in 2012, and founded Groupon's Site Reliability Engineering team. Building on her successes with SRE, in January of 2014 she helped start the Engineering Standards and Culture team as the Sr. Manager for Global Engineering Education. With degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Theater Management, Connie-Lynne brings not only 20 years of System Engineering experience to the table, but also a keen understanding of how to connect technical and creative people to each other. Connie-Lynne has worked at Linden Lab, Yahoo, and Caltech, but admits that her most fun position is as a board member for the Grilled Cheese Invitational.

While a good SRE team is proactive during the design phase many things can affect the reliability of the service. A critical aspect of planning is practicing what happens in the worst-case scenario and if the product and team can respond and recover quickly. Many teams do continuous testing, spot-checking, or large scale annual tests. This panel will discuss the how to do this safely, justify to the company, and the followup that is required to really leverage the advantages of these tests.

Richard Waid joined LinkedIn in 2012, moving to Mountain View from a diverse background in Software Engineering and Operations in New Zealand. As a Staff SRE at LinkedIn, Richard faces the daily paradox of SRE everywhere: figuring out what went wrong while making sure that it never happens again. His responsibilities at LinkedIn include leading the SRE team responsible for the LinkedIn profile and engagement.

Monitoring is more than just looking at averages and up/down states, this session will focus on how and what to monitor as well as compare and contrast whitebox and blackbox monitoring. This talk will also touch on best practices Mark has developed over time for setting up monitoring when launching a new service.

When your service starts to get overloaded a strategy for graceful degradation is to start to offload some of the traffic/load such that you don’t experience a complete meltdown. This panel will discuss the various strategies for how to handle this problem.

Akhil Gupta is responsible for the infrastructure at Dropbox. Prior to joining Dropbox in 2012, he was a principal engineer at Google responsible for the search ads serving infrastructure. He earned a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He received his Master's Degree in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park.

Nick Berry joined SRE at LinkedIn in 2011 and is responsible for Infrastructure: internal/external traffic routing and load balancing, presentation, security, and monitoring/alerting/automation. Prior to LinkedIn, Nick has a colorful background, from Yahoo’s global home pages to data centers (Wavve, RagingWire) to dialup ISPs (JPSNet, OneMain, Internet49). Nick dropped out of American River College while pursuing a degree in Mathematics and is a Cho Dan in Tang Soo Do Martial Way Association.

Large scale systems fail in surprising ways. In order to stay on top of the game, the detection and data visualization systems have to evolve together with the underlying systems and you need to learn lessons to build long term solutions that can avoid the same failure from happening over and over again in different parts of your infrastructure. This talk is about breakage, debugging and building long term scalable solutions from those experiences.

SRE, Production Engineer, DevOps—Regardless of what you call the role at your company, its the engineering that truly defines the work of the engineer who is focused on the reliability of their product, but without a culture that defines the role appropriately in the company, you could just be another Operations team. This panel will discuss how to make sure SRE is part of engineering and the team is focused on the right work.