Sebastian Kirsch, Google Switzerland GmbH
How do you perform up to 70 product and feature launches per week safely and reliably? Google staffed a dedicated team of Site Reliability Engineers to solve this question: Launch Coordination Engineers (LCEs) work across Google's service space to audit new products and features for reliability, act as liaisons between teams involved in a launch, and be gatekeepers. Google designed its launch process to be easy on developers, scalable and provide a consistent bar for reliability at launch. A common checklist helped making the results of a launch review reproducible. This launch checklist was later automated into a self-service tool curated by the LCE team and re-used by other teams. The specialisation on the challenges of launching enabled the LCE team to build a breadth of experience in applicable techniques and allowed them to function as vehicles for knowledge transfer between different parts of the company.
Attendees will learn about challenges unique to launch situations, the advantages of a dedicated LCE team, how to structure a launch process, the outline of a launch checklist, and select techniques for successful launches.
Sebastian Kirsch, Google Switzerland GmbH
Sebastian Kirsch is a Site Reliability Manager for Google in Zürich, Switzerland. He manages the team responsible for the reliability of Google's financial transaction systems. Sebastian joined Google in 2006 in Dublin, Ireland, and has worked both on internal systems like Google's web crawler, as well as on external products like Google Maps and Google Calendar. He specializes in the reliability aspects of new Google products and new features of existing products, ensuring that they meet the same high reliability bar as every other Google service.
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author = {Sebastian Kirsch},
title = {Reliable Launches at Scale},
year = {2017},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = may
}