Blameless CEO Ashar Rizqi recently had the pleasure of interviewing Dustin Pearce in a virtual executive fireside chat and AMA. Dustin is an experienced leader in scaling hyper-growth, cloud-native companies, as the VP of Infrastructure at Instacart and having previously served as Head of Service Engineering at Slack.
With the extreme changes we’ve all been through these last several months, it should come as no surprise that our jobs have changed drastically, too. We’re working remotely. We’re dealing with increased resource constraints. Our services are receiving more traffic than usual, and we’re tasked with keeping things up and running. Our work-as-done may not match what we did at the beginning of 2020.
With decreased resources, increased stress and cognitive load, and social distancing policies, many teams are under extreme pressure. Without over-communication and special attention paid to organizational culture, teams can become fractured, anxious, or disillusioned.
With the difficulties we’re facing during this time, it can be difficult to keep up with the increasingly vast demand for our services. You need to make use of all the tools in your toolbelt in order to conserve your team’s cognitive resources. Two ways you can do this are through automating toil from your processes and prioritizing with SLOs.
Between COVID-19 and the typical summer slow down, offices are emptier than they’re ever been. With team members taking some much-needed time off, it’s important to know how your team will be affected. Here are some tips to help your teams function during this time of flux.
Incident classification is a standardized way of organizing incidents with established categories. Incidents can include outages caused by errors in code, hardware failures, resource deficits — anything that disrupts normal operations. Each new incident should fit into a category dependent on the areas of the service affected, and in a ranking of the severity of the incident. Each of these classifications should have an established response procedure associated with it.
CEO Ashar Rizqi had the pleasure of being a guest on Google Cloud OnAir, a Google Cloud Customer Interview Series. Ashar and interviewer Jimmy Sopko discussed how Blameless has extended our runway using Google Cloud and Google Kubernetes Engine and how the team cultivates a culture of site reliability in a changing world.
SRE is a practice adopted by best-in-class companies all over the world. As a software reliability platform purpose-built for SREs, Blameless strives to practice what we preach and utilizes SRE best practices daily to cultivate a culture of resilience. However, this wasn’t always the case.
In our previous panel, we spoke about how to overcome imposter syndrome in high tempo situations, and how culture directly affects the availability of our systems. Building on that last discussion, we gathered leading minds in the resilience industry to discuss how SRE can manage systems complexity, and how that's tightly intertwined with business health especially in the context of current health and social crises.
This is the second article of a two-part series. Click here for part 1 of the interview with Brian, Carrie, JP, and Zac to learn more about Twitter’s SRE journey. Previously, we saw how SRE at Twitter has transformed their engineering practice to drive production readiness at scale. The concept of service level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets have been key to this transformation, as SLOs shape an organization’s ability to make data-oriented decisions around reliability.
