This talk was presented at Failover Conf on April 21, 2020.

Do you offer training to the engineers in your organization or do you throw them off the deep end to “sink or swim”? Providing training and education is universally important to set team members up for success in your organization and is critical for establishing a thriving Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or DevOps practice and culture in the first place.

The specific training needs of each engineer varies depending on several factors including:

• The maturity of your organization in adopting DevOps / SRE principles, practices, and culture
• The knowledge those individuals have about your organization and infrastructure
• The experience of the individuals being trained, both in terms of technical skill and familiarity with the SRE / DevOps model

This talk will explore the business case for training, the trade-offs between cost and effectiveness, and best practices for training design and deployment depending on where your organization lies on the spectrum of size and maturity.

Learn why training is not about unleashing a fire hose of information upon unsuspecting engineers but about giving those engineers the confidence to run production systems at scale.