SREcon17 Europe/Middle East/Africa

One of the hardest things to do is trust an outside voice. What are the boundaries between live site features and service features? How much expertise is required to be on-call? Who decides what’s in the best interests of the service? How is this not another Ops team or a staff augment? Who’s "in charge" and who makes prioritization calls? How do you build mutual trust? These are just some of the challenges in building a successful partnership between a product group and SRE.

In this talk we will present what we learned about the technical, organizational, and political systems that were needed to provide SRE to the Azure Internet-of-Things product group and how this can be used as a template for your services. We will discuss how to start an engagement, build partnerships and trust across organizations, provide ROI, keep a distinct identity and the frameworks that were developed to maintain tight organizational alignment including a new take on error budgets.

Let’s continue the conversation!