Scaling for a Pandemic: How We Keep Ahead of Demand for Google Meet during COVID-19

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Wednesday, 13 October, 2021 - 17:30–17:45

Samantha Schaevitz, Google

Abstract: 

Many teams will have practiced and refined their Incident Management skills and practices over time, but no one had a playbook ready to go to manage the dramatic Coronavirus-driven usage growth of Google Meet without a user-facing incident. The response resembled more a temporary reorganization of more than 100 people than it did your typical page—the fact that there was no user-facing outage (yet), notwithstanding.

This talk will cover what this incident response structure looked like, and what made it successful.

Samantha Schaevitz, Google

Samantha Schaevitz is a Senior Staff Software Engineer in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in Zürich, where she keeps Google Meet, Calendar, Tasks, and Voice running. Originally from California, she enjoys thinking about why complex systems fail, and why airplanes do not. Her maximum latitudinal position is 67.853°.

SREcon21 Open Access Sponsored by Indeed

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