Kim Schlesinger and Sarah Zelechoski, Fairwinds
DevOps is the dream, but when you can’t make cross-functional agile teams a reality, you will need to foster collaboration between several different teams, and potentially two different companies. From miscommunication between teams to differing priorities to broken SLAs, the struggle is real.
To overcome these difficulties, you must focus on the relationship between your ops and dev teams. This alliance is what matters most and is better when all teams have a set of shared values, responsibilities, and recurring processes and tools. After attending this talk, audience members will have a list of concrete processes and tools to foster cross-team cohesion including how to create shared expectations and responsibilities, setting up regular meetings and standardizing alerting across teams through monitoring as code.
This talk will benefit anyone who works with multiple ops or dev teams to deploy and monitor infrastructure, services and applications.
Kim Schlesinger, Fairwinds
![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/styles/speaker_photo/public/schlesinger_kim_200x230.jpg?itok=wTPdBX1I)
Kim Schlesinger is a Site Reliability Engineer at Fairwinds. Prior to being an SRE, Kim was an Instructor, Web Developer, and Curriculum Designer for the Full-Stack Immersive Program at Galvanize, a codeschool in Denver, Colorado. Kim loves working at the intersection of tech and adult education.
Sarah Zelechoski, Fairwinds
![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/styles/speaker_photo/public/zelechoski_sarah_200x230.jpg?itok=j5gUAGJC)
Sarah Zelechoski began her career as an astrophysicist and has pivoted often between systems and development work, but really hit her stride in operations. She has run production operations and infrastructure management for more than 30 customers of all shapes and sizes. Sarah is currently the Vice President of Engineering at Fairwinds where her team focuses on providing expert-level guidance and a curated framework around using Kubernetes and other CNCF projects to solve challenging and interesting problems. Sarah's greatest passion is in helping others, which encompasses advocating for engineers and rekindling interest in the lost art of Service in the tech space.
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author = {Kim Schlesinger and Sarah Zelechoski},
title = {Fuzzy Lines: Aligning Teams to Monitor Your Application Ecosystem},
year = {2019},
address = {Portland, OR},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}