Increasing the bus factor

A talk focussing on scalable training of teams of all sizes who intend on using cloud native technologies. Given @ Cloud Native London

Transcript

1. Increasing the bus factor Charlotte Godley @charwarz
2. What’s the bus factor?
3. whoami Software Engineer @getdotmesh // Breaker of Kubernetes clusters charlottegodley.co.uk @charwarz on Twitter // Godley on github.
4. Onboarding myself ★ Started in an infrastructure team february of last year ★ Previous experience embedded systems up to desktop apps ★ During my interview I asked “what is a container?”
5. My team had history -
6. We owned many, many things.
7. How did this happen?
8. Too few owning too much
9. Attrition
10. Company Reorganisations
11. Bleeding edge, complex tooling
12. Fix it! Fix it!
13. Collect some data. ★ Assess how many things your team owns ★ Ask who would be willing to handle calls for those things ★ Repeat every few months.
14. Improving the data... Anyone supporting teams
15. Direct your support work so that everyone can see it.
16. More slack channels is always the answer.
17. ...but it can also cause more problems.
18. Reduce the load “Nine women cannot make a baby in one month” Fred Brooks, 1975
19. Survey users, and share the results.
20. Deprioritise tools which are used by low amounts of people
21. Encourage shared learning initiatives
22. “The people who know the most about the systems at your company are very likely the busiest.” Sean Cassidy
23. Introduce first line/second line support rotas
24. Write case studies
25. # Title **First symptom:** <!--what made you start digging?--!> **Root cause:** <!--what actually caused this to happen? Say unknown if you never resolved the problem or it went away mysteriously--!> **Steps:** 1. Ran x command, noticed this 2. Ran y command **Final remarks:**<!--if this fixed the issue, what did you see after doing those steps?--!>
26. Be patient and kind to users
27. Grumpiness does not scale.
28. 1. People will thank you
29. 2. They will leave you to it.
30. 3. They will help answer other people’s questions and requests.
31. Build up useful tooling & websites
32. Encourage contributions from others
33. 1. Good unit tests.
34. 2. Patience.
35. 3. Communication.
36. Summary
37. Thanks :) charlottegodley.co.uk @charwarz on Twitter // Godley on github.