SharePoint Saturday Denver

Another SharePoint Saturday and another great event! I want to thank the SharePoint Saturday Committee for Denver, Colorado for inviting me to speak and giving me the opportunity for not only one, but two sessions. The attendees were great and had incredible questions for both sessions.

The day started with the keynote delivered by Dan Holme about many of the announcements for SharePoint both on-prem and in Office 365. Some of the announcements were from Microsoft Ignite but some also announced prior to Microsoft Ignite. The audience loved his hands-on presentations which added to his presentation.

After the keynote, my first session of the day was Migrating SharePoint to the Cloud: Lessons Learned by Microsoft IT. The attendees were very interested in this topic and understanding how they can effectively move from SharePoint on-prem to SharePoint Online. I walked through how we setup and ran the projects to move to the cloud, the mines we stepped on and how to avoid them. I appreciated the good questions and interaction we had.

Later in the day, I got my first opportunity to co-present with Rick Claus, Lead of the Cloud Ops Advocate team at Microsoft. We spoke about our Journey to the Cloud as we have changed our careers going from Server Huggers to Cloud Administrators. We spoke about the change in mindset we had to do ourselves and then help enable in others around us. This change was internal teams at Microsoft for myself and for IT Professionals around the world for Rick. While most of the presentation was our story, the end of the presentation, including the deck, talked about how you can work to get the Cloud Mindset. Check out the links and resources to help you along.

Again, I would like to thank the SharePoint Saturday Denver team, specifically Liz Sundet and Jeff Willinger, for reaching out and asking me to speak. It also gave me a great opportunity to collaborate with Rick for the first time and to introduce Rick to the SharePoint community. I also want to thank Theresa Eller for reminding me to apply for this great day of sharing and Art Hogarth for joining in after the Tech Talk we did the day before.

Microsoft Tech Talks - Managing Success in Microsoft Teams

I want to thank Art Hogarth, Jason Morales and Adam Findlan of the Denver Microsot Tech Talks team for the opportunity to speak with Theresa Eller on how to Manage Success in Microsoft Teams. The turnout was great from the local community with IT Pros from across many different business types as well as those supporting government agencies and military branches. On top of the great attendees, the nacho bar was the hit of the day!

The attendees got to listen to me talking about the infrastructure and services that Microsoft Teams utilize. After surviving my presenting, they got to see some great demos from Theresa showing how Microsoft Teams could be used and integration with Power BI. On top of the great information, we got a lot of great questions from the audience and valuable conversations from the questions and answers.

The sides that were presented during the Tech Talk will be available by clicking the following button and finding the October 2018 Tech Talk.

Microsoft Ignite 2018

Even though this was not my first Microsoft Ignite or Microsoft TechEd, this was my first time attending as a speaker and Microsoft Expert working in a Product Group booth. I want to thank the Azure Customer Success team and the Cloud Ops Advocates for the opportunity to speak with the attendees and TheCUBE for the opportunity to chat with them about Site Reliability Engineering.

As usual with Microsoft Ignite (or Microsoft TechEd before that), the week is spent walking, talking, eating and networking. While I did not have a step counting device, I spent a good amount of time during the week with others using them. If I had to estimate my mileage, my mileage would have ranged from 4.5 miles on the shortest day to the 9-10 miles on the longest day. My legs are definitely not up for this on a consistent basis. Thanks to the hot tub at my hotel, I was able to recover a couple of times during the week.

During the week, I spent two of the days in the Azure Customer Success booth talking about the five habits of highly effective Azure users. You can head over to https://aka.ms/fivehabits to find out more about them. They include using Azure Advisor, Azure Mobile App, Azure Service Health, and Azure Roadmap. Now, you might say that is just four things. The fifth thing is engaging with your peers and the community. I am a member of #TheKrewe and the SharePoint communities. When I see very successful IT Pros, they are engaged with their communities both asking and answering questions.

This leads me to the networking part of my week. It was great to get back in touch with friends and colleagues from around the world. It was also great getting to know new friends. The one thing that Microsoft Ignite does is bring IT Pros from around the world together in one place to talk and share ideas. Michael Bender, a Cloud Ops Advocate for Microsoft and leader of #TheKrewe, talked about on his blog about a successful conference that sessions are important but hallway conversations are almost more important. I took advantage of this as much as I could throughout the week, both on-site at Microsoft Ignite and in the evenings.

The biggest part of my week was my presentation on Thursday. I have been lucky to speak at some great events on my own and on behalf of Microsoft. This is one of the highlights of my speaking career. The 75 minutes I got to talk with the attendees about my journey towards the Site Reliability Engineering role was very close to my heart. I can't thank the attendees both in-person and online. The best part is the session was recorded and available online for those that could not attend live. You can watch the video streaming below or click on the button below, sign up for a Tech Community account, and download the video and PowerPoint deck.

If that wasn't enough, I got another opportunity thanks to Phoummala Schmitt, another Cloud Ops Advocate from Microsoft. She introduced me to Stuart Miniman from TheCUBE and we got to chatting about Site Reliability Engineering. One thing led to another and I got the opportunity to that with Stu and his co-host, Rebecca Knight, about SRE on TheCUBE. Thanks to Stu, Rebecca and the team from TheCUBE for the opportunity to talk about SRE in the Enterprise environment.

Jared Shockley, Sr. Site Reliability Engineer, Microsoft sits with Stu Miniman & Rebecca Knight for Microsoft Ignite 2018 for Microsoft Ignite 2018 in Orlando, FL. #MSIgnite #Microsoft #theCUBE #SRE #AzOps

Microsoft Ignite 2018 was a great week for me professionally and personally. With the move of the event to early November next year, I am hoping to get myself back as a speaker.

Site Reliability Engineering at Ignite 2018

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a new role for many folks in the Microsoft ecosystem. This role has been around with some major companies like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Etsy. Translating the SRE role to an enterprise IT organization has been something that Microsoft has been part of and driving for Microsoft, but also for our customers. At Ignite 2018, you are going to see the thoughts of this transformation into SRE from the mindset of Service Engineering.

For those of you attending Ignite 2018 in-person, please join me and my other SRE speakers along with other speakers on how to succeed with Azure in the Azure Customer Success area in the Microsoft Showcase area left of the Landmark as you walk in. Look in the Applications & Infrastructure area for the Customer Success in Azure area. I will be in the booth from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm on Monday, Sept. 24, 2018 and 10:00 am to 1:00pm on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2018. While we will have speakers to the SRE role at all times in the Customer Success in Azure area, please feel free to stop by during my shifts to understand about the change to the SRE role from IT Operations.

While the Customer Success in Azure area is a great opportunity for those of you here in Orlando, there are ways for folks attending virtually and in-person to get more information on the SRE role. We have four great sessions about the SRE role through the week and some great speakers presenting those sessions. Join these great speakers, including myself, to hear more about how the SRE role works and how IT Pros can look to move to the SRE role in their career. These sessions will be available live for those in-person, live-streamed for those unable to be here in-person, and recorded to view after they are complete.

Please come join myself, David Blank-Edelman, Kishore Jalleda, and Jason Hand to understand how this role fits into not only single service online companies but into the corporate IT environment.

Tuesday, September 25, 2018

BRK2272 - Introducing Site Reliability Engineering
David Blank-Edelman, Microsoft 
9:00 AM in OCCC W240 (45 min)

Just within the last fifteen years we have seen at least two separate communities evolve from the generic idea of operations. The first, DevOps, grew up very much in public. The second, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) germinated more within the halls of public cloud providers, but is now starting to catch on like wildfire throughout the industry in organizations of all sizes and stripes. SRE is providing them with a concrete approach for preserving the stability of their production environment while maintaining the feature velocity crucial for the success of the business. Join us while we explore the basic ideas behind SRE and talk about how you can get started implementing its principles and practices in your own organization.

BRK2314 - Incident response: Where SRE and DevOps collide
Kishore Jalleda, Microsoft 
Jason Hand, Microsoft
10:45 AM in OCCC W205 (75 min)

What happens when things go wrong? The 1ES Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team has built an effective incident response process that drives reliability and performance in their own services and services they depend on. We dive into what incident response looks like from notification or detection all the way through the post-mortem and remediation of the contributing factors.

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Thursday, September 27, 2018

BRK4025 - Implementing SRE practices on Azure: SLI/SLO deep dive
David Blank-Edelman, Microsoft 
9:00 AM in OCCC W311 A-D (45 min)

One of the most useful practices many organizations embrace when they first implement Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is the adoption of Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Once in place, they can serve as a concrete foundation for the tricky negotiation between feature velocity and operational stability crucial for achieving the desired reliability of your services, systems, and products. Join us for a technical deep dive as we explore the basics of SLIs/SLOs and the tools Microsoft Azure provides to help implement and manage them in your environment.

BRK2362 - The SRE role: An unexpected journey
Jared Shockley, Microsoft
10:45 AM in OCCC W304 E-H (75 min)

As the world of information technology advances, the correlating roles and responsibilities also continue to evolve. Examining the progress from IT operations through service engineering and into site reliability engineering, IT pros will need a strategic development plan that builds on current skill sets.

In this session, we discuss the mindset required for effective site reliability engineering, including how to most efficiently grow career skills, utilize specific tools and processes, and incorporate lessons learned from inherent failures. We also analyze the results of platform moves to modern engineering practices and systems.

Transparency is key ... Azure South Central US Outage

Hello to all of my readers. I wanted to reach out as I, like many of you, was heavily impacted as a customer of Azure services being down in the South Central US region (San Antonio, TX). When I got to work that morning, my team was definitely in fire-fighting mode as we had many of our services offline or impacted during the outage.

While planning for business continuity is important, reacting with the best information possible is the first step in the response. After I logged into the system, I did a check of Twitter, tech blogs, and news sites to see what was being published about the outage and what I saw was horrible. Much like the AWS Eastern US Storage outage of February 28th, 2017, many companies were knocked offline by this outage including systems at Microsoft, both internally and exterally focused.

One of the keys of any technology team has to be transparency with its customers. As a former Director of IT and current member of SRE team, the balance of transparency versus putting out too much information to scare your customers is a tight rope we have to walk. Many folks feel too much information will scare users and customers away. On the other side of the spectrum, not enough information makes users and customers leave the service because the feel the service "is a black box" and get no information about it.

After having read the Post Mortem from the Azure DevOps Team (formerly Visual Studio Team Service) and the preliminary Post Mortem from Azure, I think that transparency has been reached. I have always been proud to be part of VSTS/Azure DevOps teams in our transparency to internal and external customers. At the same time, I have desired more transparency from other teams at Microsoft and now I am seeing that from Azure.

Give both of these post mortems a quick read and you can determine if they are transparent enough or too transparent for your tastes. Figure out with your teams how much transparency to give to your customers and plan for that in your communicaitons including post mortems. Remember that you want a certain level of transparency from your providers so think about what your customers want from you.

Lightning Image - Copyright 2007, Mike Switzerland