Laura Nolan and Niall Murphy, Stanza Systems
This session explores the moral responsibilities of SREs in an AI-driven world. As AI becomes part of technology work, including SRE, new questions of professional responsibility emerge.
What can we reasonably delegate to AI tools? What do we need to keep doing ourselves and why? How do we manage more advanced tools, particularly those which may 'hallucinate' or otherwise be unpredictable? What opportunities exist to reduce the human cost of software operations work without creating unacceptable production risks?
Laura Nolan is a software engineer and SRE. She has contributed to several books on SRE, such as the Site Reliability Engineering book, Seeking SRE, and 97 Things Every SRE Should Know. Relevant to this session, she also holds an MA in Ethics from Dublin City University. Laura is a member of the USENIX board of directors and a long-time SREcon volunteer. She lives in rural Ireland in a small village full of medieval ruins.
Niall Richard Murphy has worked in computing infrastructure since the mid-1990s, and has been employed by every major cloud provider (specifically Amazon Google, and Microsoft) from their Dublin, Ireland offices in a variety of roles from IC to Director. He is currently CEO/Co-founder of Stanza Systems, a small startup in the ML/AI/reliability space. He is the instigator, co-author, and editor of multiple award-winning books on networking, reliability, and machine learning, and he is probably one of the few people in the world to hold degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Poetry Studies. He lives in Dublin with his wife and two children.
author = {Laura Nolan and Niall Murphy},
title = {Responsible Use of {ML} in {SRE} Work: Between a (Thinking) Rock and a Hard Place},
year = {2025},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}