Persistent SRE Antipatterns: Pitfalls on the Road to Creating a Successful SRE Program Like Netflix and Google

What isn’t Site Reliability Engineering? Does your NOC escalate outages to your DevOops Engineer, who in turn calls your Packaging and Deployment Team? Did your Chef just sprinkle some Salt on your Ansible Red Hat and call it SRE? Lots of companies claim to have SRE teams, but some don’t quite understand the full value proposition, or what shiny technologies and organizational structures will negatively impact your operations, rather than empowering your team to accomplish your mission. You’ll hear stories about anti-patterns in Monitoring, Incident Response, Configuration Management, and more that we’ve tripped over in our own teams, seen actually proposed as good practice in talks at other conferences, and heard as we speak to peers scattered around the industry. We'll also discuss how Google and Netflix each view the role of the SRE, and how it differs from the most recent incarnations of the Systems Administrator role. The talk also explains why freedom and responsibility are key, trust is required, and when chaos is your friend. The audience will leave with specific principles and directives around avoiding traps in these problem areas that can limit their overall growth or force them into costly retooling and retraining later on.