JC van Winkel
JC van Winkel has a B.S. and an M.S. in Computer Science (the M.S. from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). From 1990 to 2010 he worked at AT Computing, a small courseware and consulting firm in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. There he taught UNIX and UNIX-related subjects, such as C++. In November 2010 he moved to Zurich to work as a software engineer in Google's Site Reliability Engineering
department at Google Switzerland in Zurich. In 2014 he co-founded the Education department of SRE: SRE EDU, of which he is a core team member.
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COVID–19 changed work and the workplace as we know it around the world. The need for social distancing meant that onboarding new team members also had to change. Google's SRE EDU team had to react and evolve in the face of rapidly changing conditions, pivoting from an in–person orientation experience for new hires with team members flying from different locations to meet together in a classroom to a fully remote experience. This talk will cover how Google's SRE EDU team delivered a work–from–home onboarding experience in 13 days, avoiding disruptions to training operations by applying SRE principles and best practices. We’ll share lessons learned from our Live → Remote postmortem that are expected to be applicable to organizations of all sizes and recommendations for how to make the most of difficult circumstances to set new hires up for success.
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This talk addresses how to apply SRE principles and best practices in running a consistent and reliable training program for an SRE team. We’ll look at this from both a technical and operations perspective. We’ll share the importance of giving new SREs hands-on experience with production infrastructure early in an environment that is real but safe for them to learn. We’ll share some challenges that we encountered in building an educational stack and associated curriculum that can be induced to break on demand (e.g., SRE managed platforms are resilient and sometimes you *can’t* easily break them in the ways you want) and approaches to solve for those challenges.
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Readers of this report will understand the state of the art for training Site Reliability Engineers in both general and domain-specific techniques. This report addresses SRE development and operations practices, along with discussion on how to sustain SRE practices through individual and organizational change. The report will look at training best practices within Google SRE, and also how some Google Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) partners approach SRE training.
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The Production Environment at Google, from the Viewpoint of an SRE
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Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, O'Reilly (2016)
