It’s 3:32am. Your phone goes off. You take a peak, you see a few text messages and a missed call all within the last 10 minutes. Oh boy, looks like it’s another incident in production…

This is a dreaded scenario that many of us have gone through, whether you are a developer, an incident manager, an executive, or part of an operations team supporting customer-facing production systems.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a term coined by Google that focuses on improving reliability of systems. It’s a collection of techniques and processes to help increase effectiveness of production systems in an effort to minimize outages and to reduce the time to restore a system when there is an outage.

Lots of organizations are adopting SRE principles and are getting good results. It ties well with any organization going through Agile adoption, as the similar thinking of culture change and guided-process enablement can be applied on the operations side.

In this talk, I present some key SRE concepts along with my experience at enabling SREs that can be implemented at various software organizations. We will look at both technical and organizational changes that should be adopted to increase operational efficiency, ultimately benefiting for global optimizations - such as minimize downtime, improve systems architecture & infrastructure.

Whether you are a seasoned technical manager, an architect, an operations engineer or even a developer, the tools and techniques presented in this session can help you to start re-shaping your technology operations to enable better systems reliability… and reduce those dreaded 3am calls!

A Techie's Guide to Improving Operations: Inspirations from Public Transit

There are lots of common challenges between technical operations and public transit operations. Public transit is a staple system in any city's infrastructure that helps to flourish the economy of the city. They have tried-and-tested runbook-type systems in place to deal with standard operations, and how to deal in times of incidents. Sounds pretty much like what technical operations teams have to deal with on a regular basis, right?

In this talk, we present some parallels between operating & running a public transit system that can be implemented at operations teams at software organizations. We will look at technical as well as simple organizational-behvaviour aspects that can be rolled out to increase operational efficiency at organizations, ultimately benefiting for global optimizations - such as minimize downtime, improve systems architecture & infrastructure.

Why is improving Ops important and often left out of agile enablement?

The world of infrastructure & operations is usually not looked at when enabling agile teams from a product management perspective. Most agile enablement process don't look at Ops early. All too often, we see the "throw over the wall, run it & figure it out" behaviour in organizations. The good news is... this behaviour is changing, slowly, but steadily, thanks to the DevOps movement.

There are lots of good literature out there on increasing operational excellence in technical organizations, however, in such a fast world, are leaders getting time to actually learn & reflect on tactics to enable themselves? Can there be easy takeaways that teams can implement starting tomorrow?

Yes they can!

By carefully seeing how a public transit system, such as the TTC, operates, there are lots of areas we can incrementally improve in Ops at our organizations.