SRE Saga: The Song of Heroes and Villains

Tuesday, 29 October, 2024 - 11:0011:40 GMT

Daria Barteneva, Microsoft Azure

Abstract: 

SRE team require a balance of technical and soft skills, creativity and teamwork to be successful. Drawing parallels between the roles, challenges and dynamics of Dungeons and Dragons party and an SRE team will help us to explore SRE journey from the team inception to developing ideal makeup in terms of tenure/seniority, skillset and align it with the context SRE team could be part of.

We will share practical examples that helps SRE teams building resiliency and effective collaboration while dealing with challenges. We will also explore different mechanisms that can channel "super hero" energy to make team stronger and nurture the talent, helping team to keep the balance of distributed knowledge and accountability.

In this talk we will discuss:

  • Examples of functional SRE team setups
  • Common challenges SRE team may encounter
  • Developing early in career SRE
  • Dealing with the change and building resilience
  • Identifying red flags and avoiding long term problems

Daria Barteneva, Microsoft Azure

Daria is a Principal Site Reliability Engineer in Observability Engineering in Azure. With a background in Applied Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, and Music, Daria is passionate about machine learning, diversity in tech, and opera. In her current role, Daria is focused on changing organisational culture, processes, and platforms to improve service reliability and on-call experience. She has spoken at conferences on various aspects of reliability and human factors that play a key role in engineering practices, and has written for O'Reilly. Daria is originally from Moscow, Russia, having spent 20 years in Portugal, 10 years in Ireland, and now lives in the Pacific NorthWest.

BibTeX
@conference {302253,
author = {Daria Barteneva},
title = {{SRE} Saga: The Song of Heroes and Villains},
year = {2024},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}

Presentation Video