I’m SRE and You Can Too!—A Fine Manual for Migrating Your Organization to the New Hotness

Friday, 31 August, 2018 - 09:0009:55

Blake Bisset, Dropbox, and Jonah Horowitz

Abstract: 

Tales of brown-field SRE transitions from Netflix, Stripe, YouTube, Chrome, and the Google acquisitions process that you can use to overcome your own obstacles to continuous operational improvement.

How do you build a sustainable SRE program? How do you migrate an existing infrastructure, teams, and workflow to an architecture that can realize the benefits of SRE? What choices have companies made with their SRE programs, and what should you consider when adopting the SRE model?

We've been through this process a half dozen times in differing circumstances and organizations, and will share with you what has worked—and occasionally failed—for us as well as attempt to answer some of the most common questions we've had from previous attendees undergoing their own SRE/DevOps transitions.

Blake Bisset, Dropbox

Blake got his first legal tech job at 16, long enough ago that he’s entitled to make shakeyfists while shouting “Get off my LAN!”

He did three startups (a Dupont/ConAgra venture; a UW biotech spinoff; and this other time some kids were sitting around New Year's Eve, wondering why they couldn’t watch movies on the Internet) before becoming an SRM.

At YouTube and Chrome his "20%" was organizing Google's global tech management conference and MentorsOnCall programs, but his happiest accomplishment was holding the go/bestpostmortem link for multiple years. He currently serves as head of Reliability Engineering at Dropbox.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {218881,
author = {Blake Bisset and Jonah Horowitz},
title = {{I{\textquoteright}m} {SRE} and You Can {Too!{\textemdash}A} Fine Manual for Migrating Your Organization to the New Hotness},
booktitle = {SREcon18 Europe/Middle East/Africa (SREcon18 Europe)},
year = {2018},
address = {Dusseldorf},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/node/218882},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

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Presentation Audio