Actionable Observability

Previous approaches to monitoring have relied primarily on infrastructure and service metrics, but modern approaches have embraced the idea of monitoring based on metrics that reflect the user experiences more accurately.

This talk will elaborate on those differences and a new monitoring approach that actions on SLOs. We’ll cover the following:
1. Observability vs Monitoring
2. Metrics and Types of Metrics & Monitors
3. Why SLOs are a good monitoring strategy

Microservice Observability with Node.js and OpenTelemetry

In this talk, we'll focus on using the OpenTelemetry standard for Node.js observability, especially Node.js applications within distributed systems. We'll dive into OpenTelemetry concepts such as auto vs manual instrumentation and the different types of telemetry data, e.g. distributed tracing, metrics, and logging.

We'll discuss this topic through the the lens of a platformized approach to implementing observability, and how this approach enables organizations to adopt OpenTelemetry. We'll define best practices, influenced by DevOps, shared tooling, and the support needed to create robust, observable applications.

Driving Sustainability with Platform Engineering

Engineering organizations often suffer from building software in a way that prioritizes short-term gains over long-term ones. This has a lot of sociotechnical consequences, including tech debt, retention issues, etc. This talk focuses on how Delivery Engineering can drive sustainability through its DevOps based principles and scalable technical practices.

For example, we’ll review how standardization can drive sustainability and provide examples. By the end, these principles and practices will tie together to form a concrete case study on how organizations can benefit from Delivery Engineering teams.

Driving Sustainability with Platform Engineering

Engineering organizations often face the consequences of building software in a way that prioritizes short-term gains over long-term ones. This has a lot of sociotechnical consequences, including tech debt, retention issues, and, ultimately, business risk. This talk focuses on how Platform Engineering can drive sustainability through its DevOps based principles, strong support system, and standardized shared architecture.

We’ll begin by reviewing what organizational sustainability is and how Platform Engineering can facilitate it. The rest of the talk will be split into three primary sections:

1. The sociotechnical principles provided by DevOps

2. The robust support structures that enable platform adoption and faster delivery.

3. The Platform architecture, its principles, common tensions, and a framework for how to build platform architectures that enable product engineers to do their best work.

By the end, these principles and practices will tie together to form a concrete case study on how organizations can benefit from Platform Engineering teams.

Trauma Informed Reliability Management

Psychological safety is particularly important for teams that manage service reliability. The vulnerability that comes with mitigating failures in production requires principles of trust, transparency, and inclusion that can only come from cultures that minimize harm and enable empowerment.

Cultivating this kind of culture requires leaders to think proactively about how to build processes and systems that enable teams to be healthy, productive, and effective, while being adequately prepared for situations when failure inevitably happens.

We’ll review the cultural consequences of chronic issues and the strategies we can use as leaders to align with our shared goal of building excellent teams. We’ll touch upon themes of privilege, power, and accountability.

Belonging in DevOps: The Importance of Intersectionality

This talk will discuss intersectionality, while uncovering the different types of intersectionality which are often overlooked by organizations. We shall also discuss tips, advice and best practices for tech professionals hoping to implement intersectional goals and make tangible changes within their organizations.

Driving Sustainability with Platform Engineering

Engineering organizations often suffer from building software in a way that prioritizes short-term gains over long-term ones. This has a lot of sociotechnical consequences, including tech debt, retention issues, etc. This talk focuses on how Delivery Engineering can drive sustainability through its DevOps based principles and scalable technical practices.

For example, we’ll review how standardization can drive sustainability and provide examples. By the end, these principles and practices will tie together to form a concrete case study on how organizations can benefit from Delivery Engineering teams.

Driving Sustainability with Platform Engineering

Engineering organizations often suffer from building software in a way that prioritizes short-term gains over long-term ones. This has a lot of sociotechnical consequences, including tech debt, retention issues, etc. This talk focuses on how Delivery Engineering can drive sustainability through its DevOps based principles and scalable technical practices.

For example, we’ll review how standardization can drive sustainability and provide examples. By the end, these principles and practices will tie together to form a concrete case study on how organizations can benefit from Delivery Engineering teams.

A Platformized Approach to Node.js

In this talk, we’ll define the challenges developers face when building Node.js applications, and how Platform Engineering can provide robust runtime experiences through best practices, shared tooling, and centralized support.

More specifically, we’ll explore how creating shared standardized platforms helps maintain consistency and reliability across distributed systems, more specifically those that have embraced Node.js as their primary runtime. By establishing a shared platform, platform engineers can ensure that all Node.js applications adhere to the same set of standards, simplifying management and maintenance.

We’ll begin by covering key principles of Platform engineering, influenced by DevOps, and provide specific examples from my experiences developing shared platforms for Node.js developers.

Psychologically Safe Reliability Management

Psychological safety is particularly important for teams that manage service reliability. The vulnerability that comes with mitigating failures in production requires principles of trust, transparency, and inclusion that can only come from cultures that minimize harm and enable empowerment.

Cultivating this kind of culture requires leaders to think proactively about how to build processes and systems that enable teams to be healthy, productive, and effective, while being adequately prepared for situations when failure inevitably happens.

We’ll review the cultural consequences of chronic issues and the strategies we can use as leaders to align with our shared goal of building excellent teams. We’ll touch upon themes of privilege, power, and accountability.

Scaling Organizations with Platform Engineering

Engineering organizations are often incentivized to prioritize short-term growth over long-term needs, leading to socio-technical consequences such as tech debt, organization siloes, and attrition. This talk focuses on how Platform Engineering can drive sustainability for growing organizations through DevOps principles, centralization, and scalable technical practices.

We'll cover these topics through the lens of standardization and provide guidance on when Platform Engineering is a practical approach. Using my experience at small and mid-size startups and large companies, we'll discuss what it means to build a sustainable organization and the natural evolution and role platform engineering plays in that organizational need. By the end of the talk, attendees will understand how Platform Engineering can provide long-term benefits to growing organizations so that short-term growth doesn't come at the expense of long-term sustainability.

Using Golang for Platform Engineering

We’ll explore how Golang can improve platform engineering with its robustness, concurrency model, and cross-platform support. We’ll talk about DevOps best practices and Golang examples for creating tools, deployment automation, integrations, and using infra-as-code.

Driving Sustainability with Platform Engineering

Engineering organizations often suffer from building software in a way that prioritizes short-term gains over long-term ones. This has a lot of sociotechnical consequences, including tech debt, retention issues, etc. This talk focuses on how Platform Engineering can drive sustainability through its DevOps based principles and scalable technical practices.

For example, we’ll review how standardization can drive sustainability and provide examples. By the end, these principles and practices will tie together to form a concrete case study on how organizations can benefit from Platform Engineering teams.

Effective Observability Microservices Architectures

I discuss a standardized platform-focused approach to building effective observable architectures, including how the approach addresses the new organizational challenges specific to microservices. This approach encompasses three parts: the patterns, the organizational support, and the stack of tools. You'll explore these concepts at a high level, with practical examples, and learn how to address these organizational challenges.

Effective Observability in Microservice Architectures

Managing microservice architectures requires navigating highly complex systems. This complexity informs how we approach making these systems observable.

We’ll review a standardized platform-focused approach to building effective observable architectures, including how it addresses the new organizational challenges specific to microservices. The platform-focused approach encompasses three parts: the patterns we use, the needed organizational support, and the stack we use.

Effective Observability Microservices Architectures

Managing microservice architectures requires navigating highly complex systems. This complexity informs how we approach making these systems observable.

We’ll review a standardized platform-focused approach to building effective observable architectures, including how it addresses the new organizational challenges specific to microservices. The platform-focused approach encompasses three parts: the patterns we use, the needed organizational support, and the stack we use.

Psychologically Safe Reliability Management

Psychological safety is particularly important for teams that manage service reliability. The vulnerability that comes with mitigating failures in production requires principles of trust, transparency, and inclusion that can only come from cultures that minimize harm and enable empowerment.

Cultivating this kind of culture requires leaders to think proactively about how to build processes and systems that enable teams to be healthy, productive, and effective, while being adequately prepared for situations when failure inevitably happens.

We’ll review the cultural consequences of chronic issues and the strategies we can use as leaders to align with our shared goal of building excellent teams. We’ll touch upon themes of privilege, power, and accountability.

Psychologically Safe Reliability Management

Psychological safety is particularly important for teams that manage service reliability. The vulnerability that comes with mitigating failures in production requires principles of trust, transparency, and inclusion that can only come from cultures that minimize harm and enable empowerment.

Cultivating this kind of culture requires leaders to think proactively about how to build processes and systems that enable teams to be healthy, productive, and effective, while being adequately prepared for situations when failure inevitably happens.

We’ll review the cultural consequences of chronic issues and the strategies we can use as leaders to align with our shared goal of building excellent teams. We’ll touch upon themes of privilege, power, and accountability.

Effective Observability in Microservices

This talk will focus on how to create an effective monitoring system across an organization’s entire microservice architecture. This talk combines principals from effective monitoring with microservice architecture patterns to define criteria that will set microservice organizations up for success.

One example of effective techniques include having consistency across all services since this consistency can centralize the definition of observability & what it means to have an “observable” system, make it easier to set up monitoring for services, and enable engineers to troubleshoot production issues across their own services and service dependencies.

Another example is having SLOs that align well with microservice ownership. Much like any given team should not own more than a few services, any given team also should not own more than a few different SLOs. I will dive into the organizational benefits that microservices provides and SRE reinforces by implementing SLOs.

Thirdly, how the main units of an observable system (events) align well with event-driven microservices. I will go into specifics on how events, logs, metrics, and traces relate to one another.

Psychological Safety for SRE teams

This talk will talk about how principles from trauma-informed teaching & management can be applied to Site Reliability Engineering teams, making them more effective, productive, and happy. It will discuss both the concepts and implementation details of these concepts, making sure to highlight benefits and match them to existing SRE principles.

Effective Observability in a Microservices Architecture

This talk will focus on how to create an effective monitoring system across an organization’s entire microservice architecture. This talk combines principals from effective monitoring with microservice architecture patterns to define criteria that will set microservice organizations up for success.

Effective Observability in Microservices

This talk will focus on how to create an effective monitoring system across an organization’s entire microservice architecture. This talk combines principles from effective monitoring with microservice architecture patterns to define criteria that will set microservice organizations up for success.

One example of effective techniques include having consistency across all services since this consistency can centralize the definition of observability what it means to have an “observable” system, make it easier to set up monitoring for services, and enable engineers to troubleshoot production issues across their own services and service dependencies.

Another example is having SLOs that align well with microservice ownership. Much like any given team should not own more than a few services, any given team also should not own more than a few different SLOs. I will dive into the organizational benefits that microservices provides and SRE reinforces by implementing SLOs.

Thirdly, how the main units of an observable system (events) align well with event-driven microservices. I will go into specifics on how events, logs, metrics, and traces relate to one another.

Effective Observability in Microservice Architectures

This talk will focus on how to create an effective observability system in microservice architectures. This talk focuses on which observability practices and microservice architecture patterns align well and set microservice organizations up for success.

One example of effective techniques includes having consistency across all services since this consistency can centralize the definition of observability & what it means to have an “observable” system, make it easier to set up observability for services, and enable engineers to troubleshoot production issues across their own services and service dependencies.

Another example is having SLOs that align well with microservice ownership. Much like any given team should not own more than a few services, any given team also should not own more than a few different SLOs. I will dive into the organizational benefits that microservices provides and SRE reinforces by implementing SLOs.

Thirdly, how the main units of an observable system (events) align well with event-driven microservices. I will go into specifics on how events, logs, metrics, and traces relate to one another

Fitting Site Reliability & Developer Experience into Your Team’s Priorities

This talk will focus on how you can use principles & metrics from Site Reliability teams and Developer Experience teams to create a culture of technical excellence, high velocity, and psychological safety.

When thinking about metrics that guide technical & team strategy, there are two underlying priorities that ideally should align towards one goal: system and engineering team health. Metrics relating to system health provide insight on how stable the user experience is, whereas engineering team health metrics provide insight on the experience of the engineers building these systems.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) defines the guiding principles and processes for ensuring system health, whereas Developer Experience (DX) is less about the actual system and more about the tools, processes, and productivity levels related to the development cycle of that system.