Netflix

How Did Things Go Right? Learning More From Incidents

What is the focus of your work today?

I am part of a team at Netflix that we call the Core Team. At the moment, we're about ten people who are tasked with ensuring the availability of Netflix. One of the ways we do that is by helping the organization learn through the incident lifecycle. Our team has a variety of backgrounds that we are seeking to expand even further, but largely consists of people who have worked as software engineers and SREs in the reliability space on highly customer-focused products.

What’s the motivation for this talk?

Learning from incidents in software is something we just don't get exposed to nearly as much as we should early on in our careers. Once we do encounter an incident, we tend to focus on why things went wrong. Highlighting and learning from our failures is important, but it's not enough. We need to respond to incidents with an eagerness to learn through holistic approaches rather than oversimplifications. I want to help move our industry past that limiting, gut reaction of, "How do we stop this from ever happening again?"