Daria Barteneva, Microsoft Azure
Reliability and velocity often feel like opposing forces - but what if we treat them as strategic games? This talk reframes sociotechnical trade-offs through a game theory lens, using Nash equilibria, Stag Hunt, Public Goods, and Shapley value to model real-world SRE dynamics.
We’ll explore why, without shared decision models, teams default to fragile equilibria like “freeze all changes,” and how mechanism design - error budgets, canary deployments, and progressive rollouts - can shift incentives toward safer, higher-utility outcomes.
Grounded in SRE practice and backed by DevOps research, this session equips you to diagnose bad equilibria, design guardrails, and influence system-level behavior - not just symptoms. Learn how to apply cooperative and non-cooperative game theory to reliability engineering and craft strategies that scale across teams, products, and platforms.
Daria is a Principal Site Reliability Engineer in Observability Engineering in Azure. With a background in Applied Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, and Music, Daria is passionate about machine learning, diversity in tech, and opera. In her current role, Daria is focused on changing organisational culture, processes, and platforms to improve service reliability and on-call experience. She has spoken at conferences on various aspects of reliability and human factors that play a key role in engineering practices, and has written for O'Reilly.
author = {Daria Barteneva},
title = {Reliability Equilibrium: The Hidden Playbook behind {SRE} Influence},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
