Clearing the Way for SRE in the Enterprise

Do you get excited listening to the SRE success stories from companies whose practices, infrastructure, and tooling seems ready-made for this new style of working? But then do you quickly become disillusioned when you look back at the hairball that is your company's multiple generations of legacy infrastructure, tooling, skills, processes, and business constraints? This talk is for you. 

We'll first look at how decades of traditional operations beliefs and practices leave organizational scar tissue that is difficult to overcome. We'll examine examples of how silos, excessive toil, reliance on queues, and incorrectly applied governance models undermine the adoption of SRE principles and practices in the enterprise. 

We will also look at how high-performing enterprises are having success transforming their operations. Specifically, we'll look at the design patterns they applied to change organizational structures, update roles/responsibilities, align incentives, and change individual mindsets. The result was that these organization cleared away that scar tissue and made it easier to move to an SRE model of working.

Note: This talk is based on Damon Edwards's chapter "Clearing the Way for SRE in the Enterprise" in the upcoming Seeking SRE (O'Reilly 2018).