SRE UIs—Transcending the CLI

SRE Tooling is often limited to command line interfaces, making them inaccessible to a "non-SRE" audience. The barrier of entry to doing usable UI for SRE often seems insurmountable and plagued with many horror stories, coupled with the natural tendency of SRE Engineers to not have the necessary training to do UI design. This talk will present a framework and approach for integrating and building UIs into the SRE toolbox. Topics covered will include general architectural approaches to library design for SRE tooling in order to facilitate UI buildout, overview of some basic UI pitfalls and best practices, an approach to crafting your own unique toolset with minimal development investment, and and ongoing maintenance.

Michael Avrukin is a Site Reliability Engineering Manager at Google. Prior to Google Michael worked at numerous startups, helping to scale and build out teams across multiple countries and continents working with AWS, AliYun, GCE, and other cloud platforms to deliver enterprise-level QoS solutions and services. Michael spent his early career doing UI development on Windows, OS X, and later with early JavaScript before transitioning to back-end and infrastructure engineering where he brought his passion for visual eye candy.