SRE Conf 2023
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SRE Conf 2023

Availability and reliability 24/7- the SRE life

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Schedule for the conference on 24 November is published.

Why SRE Conf?

When any organization goes from product market fit or beta test phase to production rollout, or from first x customers to 10x or 100x customers and starts scaling, they typically start running into challenges with systems stability and resiliency. These challenges change with every phase of growth. So does the need for having a SRE team and/or a DevOps team, and the role these teams play.
Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to what roles these teams should play, and which tools various teams should use to track the metrics and processes involved. But there are some common building blocks that apply in similar (and different) ways and forms for most teams. The idea of the SRE Conference is to get together and to know about these building blocks, share and learn about the themes that fall under the SRE umbrella.

SRE Conf tracks

SRE Conf is a two-track conference. The track, “Culture, career and Evolution” is more focused on leadership, team, and organizational topics while the “Stories from the Trenches” track will cover real-world scenarios, and lessons learned which will help engineers and engineering teams to upskill themselves by understanding experiences from their industry peers.

Culture, career, and evolution

  1. SRE v/s DevOps v/s Platform Engineering teams in organizations.
  2. Hiring and building SRE teams.
  3. Blameless postmortems.
  4. Role of AI in SRE/DevOps/Platforms.
  5. FinOps and cost optimization.
  6. SRE Anti-patterns

Stories from the trenches:

  1. Incident management.
  2. Change management.
  3. Scalability and performance.
  4. SLA/SLO and golden signals.
  5. Security and DevSecOps.
  6. Systems and networking.

Key takeaways for participants

  1. Improved understanding of organizational needs and requirements.
  2. Enhanced optimization skills.
  3. Networking opportunities.
  4. Knowledge sharing and community building.

Who should participate

  • Members of SRE, DevOps or platform teams.
  • A software developer or manager who is responsible for services running on any cloud platform or on-prem data center.
  • Technology leader of an engineering team that manages critical systems which should have minimal to zero downtime.

Speaking

If you are interested in speaking at the conference, submit your talk idea here. The editors - Sarika Atri, Safeer CM and Saurabh Hirani - will review your talk description and give feedback.

Speakers will also receive feedback and assistance during rehearsals from past speakers such as Sitaram Shelke.

Guidelines for speaking, speaker honorarium policy, and travel grant policy details are published here.

About the editors

This conference themes were set up by Sarika Atri and Safeer CM. Together with Saurabh Hirani, the three editors have:

  1. Reviewed the talks.
  2. Set up the editorial workflow.
  3. Finalized talk selections.
  4. Curated the schedule.

Sarika Atri is Software Architect with over twenty years experience in the industry. Sarika was reviewer for Rootconf Cloud Costs Optimization conference held in July 2023.
Safeer CM is Senior Staff SRE at Flipkart. He is author of Architecting Cloud-Native Serverless Solutions published by Packt.
Saurabh Hirani is former editor of Rootconf, and a passionate member of the community. Saurabh is SRE at Last9.io,. He has a keen interest in mentoring speakers.

Become a Rootconf Member to join

SRE Conf is a community-funded conference. It will be held in-person. Attendance is open to Rootconf members only. Support this conference with a membership. If you have questions about participation, post a comment here.

Sponsorship

Sponsorship slots are open for:

  1. Tool and solutions providers.
  2. Companies interested in tech branding for hiring.

Email sponsorship queries to sales@hasgeek.com

Contact information

Join the Rootconf Telegram group at https://t.me/rootconf or follow @rootconf on Twitter.
For inquiries, contact Rootconf at +91-7676332020.

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All submissions
This submission has been added to the schedule

Biju Chacko

@botsie

Hacking Organisations -- From SRE to SRE Manager

Submitted Oct 27, 2023

Short Abstract

Most SREs consider the manager track at some point. But while it’s easy to read about the technical and project management aspects of being an SRE Manager there’s very little about the reality of the day to day job.

In the past 25 years I’ve learned that management is the art of hacking organisations. Much like hacking infrastructure or code it requires many skills. In this talk, we discuss what makes you a good candidate, the key skills you’ll need and what will have to change in how you think about the job.

Abstract

At some point in their careers most SREs consider pursuing the manager track. Unfortunately, while it’s easy read up about the technical, operational or project management aspects of being an SRE Manager but that is often less than a third of the job.

What do SRE Managers really do? Many people are filled with vague, mistaken ideas of the job gleaned from observation of the limited part of their manager’s job that is visible to them. Without a clear idea of what the job entails, how do you decide if it is something that you want to do?

In many tech companies there is very little management training -- new managers are often dropped head first into the job and are expected to just figure it out. They spend years being ineffective and may end up losing a hard-won opportunity.

In the past 25 years I’ve been a developer, an SRE and a manager. I’ve led all sorts of teams --from ones with 2 people to some with 250 people. I initially saw it as an unpleasant necessity but as I learned more it became fascinating. In the same way how it’s fun to hack technology to get the result you need, the fun of management is hacking organisations to achieve a desired outcome. In this talk, I distill what I’ve learned about this kind of hacking, that is, being a manager.

We start by discussing what characteristics set you out as a good candidate for management. We then go on what SRE managers do. What skills will you need to learn to succeed as a manager? This could be as varied as basic communication skills to reading a balance sheet. However, the most interesting skills may be “meta-skills”, that is, knowing when to apply other skills and what their limits are.

An old aphorism says that “90% of technology problems are actually people problems” so it stands to reason that managers spend most of their time dealing with people. We’ll look at some the problems you’ll face with your team, your peers, your customers or your boss.

Finally, you’ll find that many of your fundamental assumptions don’t apply anymore when you become a manager. The faster you understand this, the faster you’ll become effective. We’ll close by going through some lessons I learned the hard way.

Managing SREs can a rewarding career but it is quite different from being an SRE. Understanding what being a manager is like can help you decide whether it interests you but more importantly it will help you work more productively with your managers.

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We care about site reliability, cloud costs, security and data privacy