Site Reliability Engineering at Ignite 2018
Are you attending or watching Ignite 2018? Here’s the resources around Site Reliability Engineering here or on-line at Ignite. Come find out more about this role and how to transform your career to take this role.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a new role for many folks in the Microsoft ecosystem. This role has been around with some major companies like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Etsy. Translating the SRE role to an enterprise IT organization has been something that Microsoft has been part of and driving for Microsoft, but also for our customers. At Ignite 2018, you are going to see the thoughts of this transformation into SRE from the mindset of Service Engineering.
For those of you attending Ignite 2018 in-person, please join me and my other SRE speakers along with other speakers on how to succeed with Azure in the Azure Customer Success area in the Microsoft Showcase area left of the Landmark as you walk in. Look in the Applications & Infrastructure area for the Customer Success in Azure area. I will be in the booth from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm on Monday, Sept. 24, 2018 and 10:00 am to 1:00pm on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2018. While we will have speakers to the SRE role at all times in the Customer Success in Azure area, please feel free to stop by during my shifts to understand about the change to the SRE role from IT Operations.
While the Customer Success in Azure area is a great opportunity for those of you here in Orlando, there are ways for folks attending virtually and in-person to get more information on the SRE role. We have four great sessions about the SRE role through the week and some great speakers presenting those sessions. Join these great speakers, including myself, to hear more about how the SRE role works and how IT Pros can look to move to the SRE role in their career. These sessions will be available live for those in-person, live-streamed for those unable to be here in-person, and recorded to view after they are complete.
Please come join myself, David Blank-Edelman, Kishore Jalleda, and Jason Hand to understand how this role fits into not only single service online companies but into the corporate IT environment.
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
BRK2272 - Introducing Site Reliability Engineering
David Blank-Edelman, Microsoft
9:00 AM in OCCC W240 (45 min)
Just within the last fifteen years we have seen at least two separate communities evolve from the generic idea of operations. The first, DevOps, grew up very much in public. The second, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) germinated more within the halls of public cloud providers, but is now starting to catch on like wildfire throughout the industry in organizations of all sizes and stripes. SRE is providing them with a concrete approach for preserving the stability of their production environment while maintaining the feature velocity crucial for the success of the business. Join us while we explore the basic ideas behind SRE and talk about how you can get started implementing its principles and practices in your own organization.
BRK2314 - Incident response: Where SRE and DevOps collide
Kishore Jalleda, Microsoft
Jason Hand, Microsoft
10:45 AM in OCCC W205 (75 min)
What happens when things go wrong? The 1ES Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team has built an effective incident response process that drives reliability and performance in their own services and services they depend on. We dive into what incident response looks like from notification or detection all the way through the post-mortem and remediation of the contributing factors.
Thursday, September 27, 2018
BRK4025 - Implementing SRE practices on Azure: SLI/SLO deep dive
David Blank-Edelman, Microsoft
9:00 AM in OCCC W311 A-D (45 min)
One of the most useful practices many organizations embrace when they first implement Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is the adoption of Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Once in place, they can serve as a concrete foundation for the tricky negotiation between feature velocity and operational stability crucial for achieving the desired reliability of your services, systems, and products. Join us for a technical deep dive as we explore the basics of SLIs/SLOs and the tools Microsoft Azure provides to help implement and manage them in your environment.
BRK2362 - The SRE role: An unexpected journey
Jared Shockley, Microsoft
10:45 AM in OCCC W304 E-H (75 min)
As the world of information technology advances, the correlating roles and responsibilities also continue to evolve. Examining the progress from IT operations through service engineering and into site reliability engineering, IT pros will need a strategic development plan that builds on current skill sets.
In this session, we discuss the mindset required for effective site reliability engineering, including how to most efficiently grow career skills, utilize specific tools and processes, and incorporate lessons learned from inherent failures. We also analyze the results of platform moves to modern engineering practices and systems.
Transparency is key ... Azure South Central US Outage
Transparency is difficult at the best of times. When it comes to Post Mortems, it can dictate the difference between a customer staying with you or leaving for another service. With the big Azure outage in early September 2018, let’s look at the post mortems from that event.
Hello to all of my readers. I wanted to reach out as I, like many of you, was heavily impacted as a customer of Azure services being down in the South Central US region (San Antonio, TX). When I got to work that morning, my team was definitely in fire-fighting mode as we had many of our services offline or impacted during the outage.
While planning for business continuity is important, reacting with the best information possible is the first step in the response. After I logged into the system, I did a check of Twitter, tech blogs, and news sites to see what was being published about the outage and what I saw was horrible. Much like the AWS Eastern US Storage outage of February 28th, 2017, many companies were knocked offline by this outage including systems at Microsoft, both internally and exterally focused.
One of the keys of any technology team has to be transparency with its customers. As a former Director of IT and current member of SRE team, the balance of transparency versus putting out too much information to scare your customers is a tight rope we have to walk. Many folks feel too much information will scare users and customers away. On the other side of the spectrum, not enough information makes users and customers leave the service because the feel the service "is a black box" and get no information about it.
After having read the Post Mortem from the Azure DevOps Team (formerly Visual Studio Team Service) and the preliminary Post Mortem from Azure, I think that transparency has been reached. I have always been proud to be part of VSTS/Azure DevOps teams in our transparency to internal and external customers. At the same time, I have desired more transparency from other teams at Microsoft and now I am seeing that from Azure.
Give both of these post mortems a quick read and you can determine if they are transparent enough or too transparent for your tastes. Figure out with your teams how much transparency to give to your customers and plan for that in your communicaitons including post mortems. Remember that you want a certain level of transparency from your providers so think about what your customers want from you.
Lightning Image - Copyright 2007, Mike Switzerland
Can't make it to Ignite? Have I got some good news for you!
Can’t make it to Ignite this year in Orlando, FL? Don’t feel left out as you can join the conference remotely thanks to the internet. Find out some of the resources at your fingertips during the week.
Did you know that over 25,000 IT Professionals, Developers and Business Managers from around the world will be in Orlando, FL starting September 24, 2018 for one of the largest Microsoft Conferences this year? Are you coming to Ignite to learn and network with all of these folks? If so, don't forget to sign up for my session on my personal journey to SRE on Thursday at 10:45 am.
But wait ... you say you are not attending this year? Are you sure you are not attending because I have great news! All of the sessions are being live-streamed. Even if you can't make the trip to Orlando, you can still get the great information from the event. Plus, when the event is over, all attendees (both virtual and in-person) can view all of the content online.
Now I know many of you are saying "But Jared, how can I get to all of this lovely content?" Head on over to the Microsoft Tech Community and create an account. Not only will you get information from Microsoft and the Microsoft Product Teams, but you will get incredible content from our community contributors like our MVPs or even other users, like yourself. Once you sign up for your free account on Microsoft Tech Community, you can browse the sessions for Ignite 2018 and watch the content live during the week and on replay after Ignite is complete.
So what are you waiting for? Go sign up for your free account and get ready for all sorts of good learning!
Also, don't forget to sign up for my session on Thursday morning about the transition of IT Operations to SRE.
Microsoft Ignite 2018
September 24-28, 2018
I have some amazing news. I will be attending Ignite 2018 this year in Orlando, FL. But I just won’t be attending …
I am presenting!
I have some amazing news. I will be attending Ignite 2018 this year in Orlando, FL. But I just won’t be attending … I am presenting my first time ever at Ignite!
Many of you might have seen me present at SharePoint Saturdays, online via Microsoft IT Showcase or Channel 9, or other events and conferences. This will be my first time at Ignite and I could not be happier.
So you might be thinking that I will be speaking about Office 365, SharePoint or Azure but you would be wrong. I am going to be speaking about the transition of my career from IT Operations through Service Management into Service Engineering and finally to Site Reliability Engineering.
Many IT Pros feel like they might not understand how to make the next steps in their careers and when they hear about things like the Cloud, they get scared of it. My goal is helping you advancing your career to the next step, walking a similar journey that I have, and showing you how my career has progressed with advancing my skills and knowledge.
Come hang out with me on Thursday, September 27th from 10:45 am to 12:00 pm in W304 E-H in the Orange County Convention Center.
Microsoft Tech Talks - Managing Success in Microsoft Teams
October 5, 2018
Hey Denver! Do you want to learn more about Microsoft Teams and how you can use it successfully? In this session, Theresa Eller and myself will not only talk about but show you how to use Teams in your enviornment and how it ties into other Microsoft Applications like SharePoint, PowerBI, & Flow.
I have the great opportunity for another stop on my Road Trip this year in Denver. Working with Art Hogarth and teaming up with Theresa Eller as a co-presenter, we will be presenting how businesses can take advantage of Microsoft Teams and its integration capabilities.
During this session, Theresa and I will demonstrate how to use Microsoft Teams and how it can be leveraged with other Microsoft applications. We will show you how to use Teams to display and analyze data with Power BI, make phone calls, setup automation and other efficiencies with Flow, as well as discuss how to use API’s to connect to other data sources like Salesforce and other developer tasks. We will also discuss the various roles and platforms that are currently available.
If this sounds like something you want to learn about and happen to be in the Denver area on Friday, October 5th, register to join us.
About Theresa Eller
Theresa Eller is a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer with a passion for technology and customer success. Accordingly, she is a frequent speaker in the international SharePoint and Office 365 community. Theresa holds a Master of Arts degree in Teaching and Learning with Technology, has two dogs, and loves to travel.
Meeting Schedule
| Time | Schedule | |
|---|---|---|
| 2:00 pm | Food/Networking/Sign-in | |
| 2:15 pm | Opening/Welcome/Featured Topic | |
| 3:50 pm | Q&A |
Additional Details
- Food and drinks will be provided.
- Photographs of attendees will be taken at the event and may be used for Microsoft-internal marketing communications.
Parking
FREE Parking on site!
Location
Microsoft Office
7595 E. Technology Way, Suite 400
Denver, CO 80237