Shaping Reality to Shape Outcomes: Making SRE Work with Uber Growth

In an organization growing as rapidly as Uber (when every week engineers add 10 new services to the stack) it’s impossible to know every engineer. How do Uber SRE ensure our systems are reliable?

In this talk, I will explain how Uber SRE focused on shaping the reality that the engineering teams operate in to create a culture of reliability. Given a specific set of constraints engineers are smart and solve problems, so we made one of the primary roles of the SRE team to create a reality that made reliability part of the DNA of services, not just an add-on.

Over times instead of hoping engineers would solve a problem that almost never occurred (failure) to ones that were right in front of them we were able to change the behavior of teams we didn’t even interact with. SRE organizations are in danger of creating an adversarial relationship with engineering teams by punishing them for failures in their reliability or burdening them with “additional requirements." By reframing the reality we created an organizational baseline that means our SRE team is helping engineering teams meet their goals.

This talk will look at a little of the history of SRE at Uber, what we are doing today, and our future work. Some of the major initiatives we have conducted that have changed reality for the wider engineering population at Uber include: bootstrapping our own Datacenters in just a few months, changing our systems to actively serving traffic from multiple regions concurrently, and the many kinds of testing: datacenter failure, chaos simulations, and load testing. The technology we have built is important, but more important is making reliability our DNA.