100 Teams, 100 Ways to Fail

Friday, 1 September, 2017 - 15:3016:20

John Keiser, Microsoft Azure, and Ben Broderick Phillips, Microsoft

Abstract: 

Every SRE organization hits the same problems at some point: How do we convince teams to let us help, and own the work and results together? As an SRE, you will encounter different kinds of resistance from the teams you work with.

Azure has 100+ teams, and Azure SRE has gained experience with every type of engagement on the map. If any of these scenarios sound familiar to you:

  • Engineers that do not understand your utopian visions (nobody understands me)!
  • Everyone is rational, no one is right
  • “This too shall pass” i.e. the team that knows you will eventually sort out the rough edges in your tooling or find another job, and can safely ignore you until then

Come join Azure SRE as we share stories about teams we’ve worked with, the resistance we’ve run into, and sometimes even how we fixed it.

John Keiser, Microsoft Azure

John Keiser is a Mad Scientist of the internet age, having developed, tested and led teams for the last 20 years at places like Netscape, Bing, and Chef. Microsoft Azure now lets him play with their service, having been convinced he wouldn’t rewrite anything too critical.

If his secret lab exploded, John would leave behind a wife, three young kids, a large collection of video games, and a unicycle team.

Ben Broderick Phillips, Microsoft

Ben Broderick Phillips spent the first five years of his career automating infrastructure in a “worldwide datacenter,” which he later found out was just the server closet. After they let him out, he went to work for Microsoft, who gave him his very own desk and asked him to build systems for Azure SRE.

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BibTeX
@conference {205588,
author = {John Keiser and Ben Broderick Phillips},
title = {100 Teams, 100 Ways to Fail},
year = {2017},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

Presentation Video 

Presentation Audio