Stories from Retail Me Not & Github - SRE for the win

Sung Kang from Retail Me Not and Jessica Lucci from Github recently brought the SRE sub group to Austin DevOps. Watch for [SRE] prefixed content in the future.

Here are the talks for the evening

6:20 - 7:00 Sung Kang - Retail Me Not

The engineering organization at RetailMeNot has seen much growth and change over the years. Like many companies, we’re in a state of constant transition and improvement. No longer a scrappy startup, we’ve seen a need to manage the growing operational overhead as we continue to transition towards a microservices architecture, create new services, and as our existing services become increasingly complex. In response to this growing overhead, we have formed a new SRE team at RetailMeNot this year with the mission of enabling maximum change velocity for all services while maintaining high SLA attainment and embracing suitable risk.

This talk explores some of the operational challenges at RetailMeNot has dealt with as our engineering organization has continued to grow. We’ll discuss how these challenges have prompted the formation of the SRE team, our initial attempt at organizing and implementing SRE, and some of our initiatives for this year.

Sung Kang is a Software Engineer on the SRE team at RetailMeNot. He has a passion for improving operational efficiency, monitoring, and sleeping through the night without pages. New to the SRE role, he spends his time experimenting and implementing technologies and SRE principles to improve the operational efficiency at RetailMeNot.

7:10 - 8:10 Jessica Lucci - Github

The need for quick, iterative development, without sacrificed user experience continues to rise in the tech industry. In order to meet that need, many companies are beginning to build out, or continuing to develop, SRE organizations.

While getting these teams off the ground can often be difficult, continuing to build out and develop those teams can present a set of unique challenges: existing projects, systems and responsibilities have to be appropriately transitioned, team culture has to adapt to the collaborative nature of SRE, mindsets have to shift to enable proactive development, and so much more.

This talk will explore many of those challenges that we've encountered here at GitHub as we continue to grow and develop our SRE organization. We'll discuss GitHub's SRE philosophy, how it's defined what it means to "be an SRE at GitHub", and how we've used it to help navigate our transitional obstacles.

Jessica Lucci is an SRE on the Delivery team at GitHub, and is passionate about systems design, observability and inclusion in tech. She spends much of her time ctl'ing kubes, putting things into containers, and practicing cross-team collaboration via emojis.