A Feast of Failure

Save the date! SRE Finland is back with a celebration of failure!

Welcome to an evening of talks all about things failing in all possible ways. We will have three talks about embracing failure, what to do after the fact, and how to avoid bankrupting your employer with cloud costs, followed by an open discussion.

Presentations

This is fine -- how to embrace failure as a way of life
Markku Halinen, SOK

Absolute certainties only exist in theory. In the real world, nothing is ever certain. From this, we can deduce that everything we are responsible for will eventually fail. This talk will teach us how awareness of this eventuality can help us prepare better.

• Why should we focus more on disaster readiness and recovery than on prevention?
• What can we do to be more prepared?

Markku works as an SRE in SOK’s digital development, obsesses about failure, and helps teams detect, prevent, and mitigate it.

Let’s solve the real problem! - Improving service operations by confronting uncomfortable problems in incident post-mortems
Vitek Urbanec, incidentist.io, Zapier

Incident post-mortems may be tough, but avoiding the difficult issues won’t help us improve. By diving into these challenges head-first, we can gain the most value, recover services faster and reduce stress when disruptions occur. Vitek will highlight real-world examples of how tackling uncomfortable issues can lead to tangible improvements in service operations.

• How to apply “blameless”, without losing responsibility and ownership
• Why “5 why” method is problematic, but still valuable (with a small tuning twist)
• Why you shouldn’t rush to solve a problem in a post-mortem meeting

Vitek is helping teams improve their operational excellence and efficiency as an independent consultant, incidentist.io and manages the SRE team at Zapier.

He’s passionate about incident response, measuring reliability, team collaboration, Finnish metal and nature. He’s learning Finnish, so feel free to start a conversation! See how far you get.

Burning less money in the cloud
Jaakko Pallari, Pallari Consulting

In the recent years, many companies in the tech space are seeing their investment sources dry up and are now expected to turn a profit. This has resulted in companies scrambling to rethink their cloud expenses along with the rest of their expenses.In this talk, Jaakko will share a few ways he has tackled cloud cost optimisation and what he has learned from it.

In this session, you will learn about:

• How to approach cost reduction in an engineering organisation
• What are the challenges you will face when during the cost optimisation process
• How cloud cost optimisation relates to SRE

Jaakko helps his customers build and deliver sustainable software services via his consultancy company, Pallari Consulting.

Agenda

17.00 Doors
17.30 Welcoming words -- Otso Palonen, VP of engineering, Digital Development @ SOK
17.40 This is fine -- Markku Halinen
18.20 Break
18.30 Let’s solve the real problem! -- Vitek Urbanec
19.10 Break
19.20 Burning less money in the cloud -- Jaakko Pallari
20.00 Free discussion
20.30 Doors close