Infrastructure & Ops Superstream Series: SRE Edition

This four-part series of half-day online events, hosted by chair Sam Newman, covers the most challenging and promising topics facing those working in infrastructure and operations today:

• Site reliability engineering
• Security
• Kubernetes
• Microservices

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is the practice of ensuring a company’s digital assets remain stable, performant, and resilient. Given that all companies rely on a digital presence these days, SRE is becoming increasingly vital to the engineering teams supporting the sites- and ultimately the business.

In this edition of the O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream Series, Liz Fong-Jones, Eric Zielinski, Jason Patterson, Debbie Wood and Randy Shoup introduce you to SRE concepts and best practices so that you can learn how to put them to work in your organization.

About the presenters:

After spending time at multiple startups and 12 years at ThoughtWorks, Sam Newman is now an independent consultant. Specializing in microservices, cloud, and continuous delivery, Sam helps clients deliver software faster and more reliably through training and consulting. Sam is an experienced speaker who has spoken at conferences across the world and is the author of Building Microservices _and _Monolith to Microservices both from O'Reilly. Sam is also chair of the O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream Series.

Liz Fong-Jones is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and site reliability engineer (SRE) with 16+ years of experience. She’s an advocate at Honeycomb for the SRE and observability communities and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife Elly, metamours, and a Samoyed-golden retriever mix and in San Francisco and Seattle with her other partners. She plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights as a board member of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Eric Zielinski leads the cloud delivery organization at Nationwide, where his teams are responsible for cloud infrastructure, containers, security, and site reliability. With over 20 years of industry experience leading advanced infrastructure operations, engineering, and cybersecurity, Eric is in his 15th year at Nationwide where he has worked across the company to deliver a portfolio of products and technologies including cloud platforms, security automation, self-service adoption, and DevOps transformation. He is a frequent speaker at conferences such as Dockercon, FIRST, FS-ISAC, 614con, and many others. He holds a bachelor’s degree in information systems from Franklin University and several certifications such as GCCC, GMON, EnCE, and GCIH.

Jason Patterson works with developers, engineers, and technology leaders to flip the reliance put on manual processes. As AVP of site reliability engineering at Nationwide, he’s growing the team and injecting the role where it matters most. With experience developing and supporting applications for enterprises, academia, and startups, Jason has executed transformations across the country with the goal of improving the lives of developers.

Deborah Wood is the product manager for cloud operations in Europe at Pivotal. Together with her team, she supports the production platform for the Pivotal Tracker application, advocates for the use of site reliability engineering, and supports Pivotal product teams in feedback and improvements to the UX of operations. The cloud ops team has also supported the multi-region multi-foundation platform on which the Comic Relief’s Sport Relief campaign donations application ran in 2016 and 2018. Debbie also teaches and socializes SRE in-house.

Randy Shoup has spent more than two decades building distributed systems and high-performing teams as a senior technology leader at eBay, Google, and Stitch Fix. He coaches CTOs, advises companies, and generally makes a nuisance of himself wherever possible. Most recently, he was VP of engineering at WeWork in San Francisco. He’s particularly interested in the nexus between culture, technology, and organization.