Building and Running SRE Teams

General Stanley McChrystal led the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iran in the mid to late 2000's. While in command of the Task Force, he was responsible for transforming an organization which was dominated by Taylorist reductionism into an agile, responsive network which could dynamically adapt and win in the threat landscape around them. In his book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, he outlines the key learnings that emerged from that process. The same issues and challenges face site reliability engineers and managers for SRE teams as we cope with the complexity of our own and partner ecosystems. In this talk, I will highlight the key points from Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World and show how the solutions that helped make the Task Force successful can be applied to make SRE teams succeed too.

Kurt Andersen has been active in the anti-abuse community for over 15 years and is currently the senior IC for the Consumer Services SRE team at LinkedIn. He also works as one of the Program Committee Chairs for the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG.org). He has spoken at M3AAWG, Velocity, SREcon(US), and SANOG on various aspects of reliability, authentication and security.