Archetype of SRE SuperHero, A DevOps Journey 🐼 - DevOpsDays Portland 2017

Archetype of an SRE Superhero; A DevOps Journey 🐼

Talk Abstract

Concur has recently gone through this digital transformation of the business from a monolith application with 2 major releases per year to each 700+ developers who are committed to owning their own code in Production and owning performance from an end-to-end; giving product teams the ownership from design through production release and operations. No we have a team of 6 SREs to influence the greater orgs practices to more than 1000 developers.

As an aspiring SRE Superhero we subscribe to the idea that we are here to engineer our way out of this technical debt, AWS availability zone crisis, or even during natural disasters we stand ready as the superheroes of today’s modern infrastructure. We are here to put the right talent, practices, strategies, change control and ultimately global teamwork together to run todays high availability production operations business environment.

Talk Description

Group attendees would walk away with knowing:

* How to build an SRE Superhero; that scales with new technologies
* Specific characteristics we think an SRE Team needs to possess to be successful in todays ever changing orgs
* How to recruit in this new paradigm of SRE/DEVOPS (what are the common backgrounds and career paths)
* How to #LevelUp during conferences, Meetups and Always Be Learning

Transcript

1. Archetype of an SRE Superhero A DevOps Journey @jasongrimes
2. Who’s Jason? Dad, enduro mountain biker , music lover , connector, influencer, site reliability engineering (SRE) geek . Former @Microsoft, @Jobster, @RescueTime, @Apex_Learning now at @Concur LAMA Logging, Alerting, Monitoring, Analytics Follow me @JasonGrimes
3. The Times They Are A-Changin' - I’ve Changed! • My First Computer; C64 • Decade of On-Prem Datacenter Experience • Transitioned to DevOps+SRE 2015 • Fascinated with Communications • Multiple Winners • Open Source Everything @jasongrimes
4. What Will You Walk Away With…. • Concur’s DevOps Journey • Team Principles + Ideas • DevOps Tools + Practices • Building a SRE Superhero • Recruit in this New Paradigm • LevelUp Strategy • The Automators @jasongrimes
5. @jasongrimes • 7,000 Employees • 700 Developers (Global) • DCs: Seattle, Paris, many more • Centralized Vendor Management ◦ Elastic ◦ New Relic • End-to-End Ownership Visibility into Travel, Expense + Invoice-driven Spending @Concur
6. By the Numbers Daily 2.4M Expenses Uploaded 275K Trips Booked 700K Mobile Logins $178M Invoices Processed @jasongrimes
7. Vision Engineers solving unknown problems Automation solving known problems TL;DR; DevOps is the past NoOps is the future @jasongrimes
8. Mission Build a world-class SRE program @Concur — enabling a NoOps approach and end-to-end ownership for our development teams and setting the standard for SRE teams worldwide @jasongrimes
9. Concur’s DevOps Journey SDLC Waterfall Mixed Agile Agile Releases 9-18 months 4 months 1 month Continuous Architecture On Premise Service Monolithic Hybrid Microservices Aspirations Microservices Ops Model IT -> Ops Centralized hosted Ops DevOps NoOps • Reliable, repeatable, results over time - David Gedye (2000) • You build it you run it - Werner Vogels (2007) • End to end - Kevin Evans (2016) • Meet people where they are - Nell Shamrell (2017) @jasongrimes
10. Team Principles • Meet internal partners where they are • Acts as a Fluid Team • Engineering Excellence • Dogfooding • Enabling E2E (doh!) • Batteries Included @jasongrimes
11. Principles Only source of truth is the code • Infrastructure as a code • Configuration as code • Alerts are codified • Every commit in Github • Automated delivery architecture • SRE is a global team sport @jasongrimes
12. What Makes Global Teamwork? • ChatOps • Shared dashboards • Well defined roles • Road shows + site visits • Community newsletters • Recorded trainings • Demos every 2 weeks @jasongrimes
13. Mountains of Data and Tools + Technology
14. Cloud Services Tools • Cloud, Hybrid and On-Prem • New Relic ◦ Real User Monitoring ▪ Browser ▪ Mobile ◦ Performance Monitoring ▪ APM ▪ Infrastructure ▪ Synthetics • Elastic Stack (ELK) ◦ Logging @jasongrimes
15. ChatOps
16. Batteries Included - Your Starter Kit to Ops • Enabling Operational Maturity from Day 1 • Combine Technical + ChatOps • Measuring Performance ▪ Apdex, Disk, CPU/Load, Memory • PagerDuty integration • Slack integration @jasongrimes
17. Building a SRE SuperHero • Perfect blend of experience • Capacity to continue learning • Lead without prompting • Always ‘ON’ attitude @work • Blended technical and communications strategy @jasongrimes
18. Typical SRE Background - Science + Service • Science or Information Systems Degree • Passion for engineering excellence • Knowledge of OOP: Python, Go • Knowledge of Agile SDLC • TCP/IP networking and troubleshooting • Basic SQL querying language and techniques Be Active: Github, LinkedIn, Twitter @jasongrimes
19. Hiring in this New Paradigm Simplify the job description for Diversity Inclusion Juggling the Science versus the Service 3 background profiles: • Engineer • Operations • SDET/QA @jasongrimes
20. Leveling Up Strategy • Sharing and exchanging ideas • Bring in learning from the field • WIKI for the future • Local meetups matter • Conferences (duh!) @jasongrimes
21. Twitter is a Tool (srsly) @jasongrimes
22. The Automators: DevOps + SRE Experts (399+) @jasongrimes
23. No Twitter Experts Here @jasongrimes
24. Steal This Deck + Questions? @jasongrimes
25. Follow-up I think I’ve done enough talking. Email, DM me or if you must LinkedIn. I would love to connect. Email: jason.grimes@gmail.com Follow me @JasonGrimes