Cascading Failures

Along with success comes the risk that early design decisions can be traps just waiting to cause you the worse case outage, often referred to as a cascading failure. Mike will talk about his experience with identifying the root causes and strategies developed over time to avoid common problems. His experience in Gmail has been shared across Google’s product and SRE teams and now the SRE community.

Mike Ulrich is a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Google where he has worked since 2006. He began his career as a System Engineer but transitioned into Software Engineer while working on the Gmail SRE team. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the Univeristy of Minnesota. He is currently the tech lead of the Gmail SRE team at Google but consults across the organization in the areas of design reviews, failover, and load balancing strategies.