Jonathan Mercereau, traffiq corp.
As an SRE, you're not just responsible for building automation. Sometimes the work we do requires us to reach out to a third-party to take advantage of services they offer, such as Site Monitoring (Catchpoint, Keynote, Pingdom, ThousandEyes, etc), Log Aggregation (Splunk, Sumo Logic, Datadog, Loggly, etc.), Chat (Slack, Discord, HipChat, etc.).
Many of us have had to weigh the benefit of building or buying, integrating, and managing third-parties. Beyond the scope of features and functionality, there are a lot of things to consider related to working with a vendor, like customer support, pricing, scalability, flexibility, roadmap, track record, and real-world proving of their capabilities. There are things that may matter to you and some that don't. Let's dive into how a bad selection could be costly.
Jonathan Mercereau, traffiq corp.
Jonathan is co-founder of Traffiq, helping enterprises manage and orchestrate their web traffic infrastructure.
In his prior role as Staff SRE at LinkedIn, Jonathan helped build and lead the team at LinkedIn responsible for surviving one of the largest DDoS attacks. In his 4.5 years, the team scaled from a single engineer to 15 Site Reliability Engineers internationally, who were responsible for traffic engineering, third-party evaluation, planning, integration, tooling, automation, monitoring, M&A due diligence, interactions with legal and security, contract negotiation, procurement. Prior to LinkedIn, Jonathan was the first dedicated CDN engineer at Netflix. While at Netflix, Jonathan improved streaming in Latin America with a 40% improvement in bitrate performance and a 90% decrease in rebuffer events, launched the European CDN cohort for UK+Nordics, participated in the architecture and deployment of Open Connect, and rewrote stream selection algorithms for various Netflix Clients. Prior to Netflix, Jonathan built Video Delivery platforms for Comcast and Time Warner, and was part of the inception, evaluation, design and integration Comcast's first nationwide MPEG2 Video CDN (Project Infinity, to become Xfinity).
SREcon18 Americas Open Access Videos Sponsored by
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author = {Jonathan Mercereau},
title = {Working with Third Parties Shouldn{\textquoteright}t Suck},
year = {2018},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}