Splicing SRE DNA Sequences in the Biggest Software Company on the Planet

The principles and constructs of DevOps are pervading the industry and have lit the path for the capability to execute with both speed and quality in balance while managing hockey stick growth. SRE has established itself as the most effective incarnation of DevOps in our industry. Most companies and organizations are nowhere near “SRE goal state.” As this audience knows, building SRE, and applying the devops principles into existing companies and service code bases involves cultural engineering as well as deep tech investments. SRE is a step function change in many dimensions and requires new "genes" to be inserted into an organization's DNA. There is no larger enterprise cloud+consumer company in the world than Microsoft, and we’re on the journey now and investing heavily to shift to SRE. The core of Microsoft was not born in the cloud, but instead in first gen consumer (PC), and then rose to dominate Enterprise. There are a handful of services at Microsoft that were born in the cloud and have scaled massively, with Bing Search being the “granddaddy” with 13 years of experience in the pocket from which we have learned much. Microsoft Azure is the Enterprise Cloud. We are making an enormous investment to run at galactic scale to be the infrastructure for the world’s infrastructure and compete relentlessly in the market with top competitors. In this talk we will compare and contrast the journey within Bing to the current state of execution and operations and how we are taking the lessons from that experience, inspiration from industry, and learnings to date as we build SRE within Azure.

Greg is the Director of the Azure Site Reliability Engineering team in Azure, Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure—a multi-billion-dollar business that is the foundation of the company’s service offerings. Azure is deployed across all geographies and used worldwide by millions of customers. In addition to first party workloads such as Office 365, Bing, and Dynamics, Azure is leveraged by multi-billion-dollar Fortune 500s, small and medium size businesses, as well as startups. The production footprint is enormous—rivaled only by a couple companies on the planet. Azure is uniquely positioned in the Enterprise Cloud space and its service offerings include IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS (infrastructure, platform, and software as a service).

Outside of work, you can find Greg spending time with his family, skiing, hiking, biking, playing on the water, and voraciously consuming words (reading).