Robert Barron
Tel Aviv, Israel
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From Beta to Better: How Internal SREs Help Build Stronger Products
At IBM, our CIO SREs wear two hats. Our first responsibility is what you’d expect: maintaining the availability, performance, security, and automation of our internal systems. But our second “day job” is just as important—we are Client Zero for the products IBM is building for the world. That means we serve as alpha and beta users of our own tools, providing real-time feedback that shapes product direction before release.
Over the last few years, this second role has evolved from a side benefit to a core part of our identity. We're not just keeping systems running—we're helping build better software. Our feedback has influenced roadmaps, driven feature changes, and improved the reliability and usability of offerings that go on to serve thousands of clients.
This dual role affects everything we do: from how we build automation, to how we collaborate with product teams, to how we define success as SREs. It also redefines how the rest of IBM sees us—not just as a cost center, but as a strategic contributor to the business and the product lifecycle.
This session isn’t a sales pitch. While I’ll mention IBM products, the focus is on how we tested and matured them internally, how we influenced their evolution, and how our experience as early users made them stronger before reaching customers. I'll share lessons, challenges, and stories from the front lines of being both operators and co-creators.
Obviously a Major Malfunction... Lessons 35 years after the Challenger Disaster
The Space Shuttle was the most advanced machine ever designed. It was a triumph and a marvel of the modern world.
And on January 1986, shuttle Challenger disintegrated seconds after launch.This session will discuss how and why the disaster occurred and what lessons modern DevOps and Site Reliability Engineers can learn.
The Challenger disaster was not only a failure of the technology, but a failure of the engineering and management culture in NASA. While engineers were aware of problems in the technology stack, there was no conception of the risks they actually posed to the spacecraft. Management had shifted the focus from “prove that it’s safe to launch” to “prove that it’s unsafe to stop the launch”.
This session will present the risk analysis (or lack thereof) of the Shuttle program and draw parallels to modern software development. In the end, launching a shuttle is an extremely complex deployment to the cloud… and above it.
ChatOps, AIOps, and the virtual war room
The war room is a time-honored tradition of problem solving. While it started out as a physical location, in recent years more and more problem solving has been done in a virtual environment, using ChatOps and collaboration platforms as extensions to engineer's fingers and AIOps as extensions to their brains.
In this session you'll learn about working efficiently in modern, virtual, war-rooms and maximizing brain power and problem solving by adding AI Operations as a war-room participant.
DeveloperWeek Global (Management, Cloud, Enterprise) 2021 Sessionize Event
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