Shopify's Off to San Francisco for SREcon Americas

2 minute read

Shopify production engineering will be at SREcon Americas 2017, held on March 13 and 14. We'll be sharing our best practices and the lessons we’ve learned along the way. 

Tracking Service Infrastructure at Scale - John Arthorne

With the Shopify SRE team focused mainly on the most critical systems, we faced a looming crisis with hundreds of other important applications suffering from lack of clear ownership, inconsistent infrastructure, and poor automation. Here are some of the tools Shopify built for scaling out strong SRE infrastructure and practices across a large fleet of applications.

Monday, March 13, 2017 at 2:50 pm to 3:40 pm, Track 2

Lightning Talks (times to be confirmed)

Data Center Automation at Shopify - David Radcliffe

The flexibility and speed offered by cloud computing solutions have raised the bar for bare metal deployments. Automation is essential to speedy and reliable provisioning and capacity management. We’ll share some of the tools we’ve utilized to automate our data center and empower our developers to move quickly and keep up with the times.

Monday, March 13, 2017 at 2:50 pm to 3:40 pm, Track 3

Four-Minute Deploys: No Engineers Necessary - Lei Lopez

Previously, our devs had to ping an SRE to deploy. This process was prone to error and wasteful. Today, a chatbot automatically deploys Shopify over 40 times a day in four minutes, without losing any requests. The journey wasn’t easy, but undeniably worth it. I’ll share how we made this possible by leveraging Nginx, Docker, and our open-source deployment tool Shipit.

Tuesday, March 14, 2017 at 3:50 pm to 4:45 pm, Track 2

How Three Changes Led to Big Increases in On-call Health - Dale Neufeld

Burnout, unfortunately, is commonplace in operations, and its negative effects are well-documented. However, it doesn’t have to be inevitable. Recently, we realized that action had to be taken to establish a better on-call experience, including moving to a production engineering model. I’ll share specific actions that not only helped to keep our team healthy but also grew people’s expertise.

Tuesday, March 14, 2017 at 3:50 pm to 4:45 pm, Track 2

Booth Presence

You can also catch us at our booth (#3, in the Grand Foyer), where we'll be hosting office hours, chatting about topics related to our talks.

Monday, March 13:
9:55 am to 12:50 pm - Handling Massive Flashes of High-Write Traffic
12:50 pm to 3:45 pm - Road to an SRE Model
3:45 pm to 6:30 pm - Tools for Tracking Service Infrastructure at Scale

Tuesday, March 14:
9:55 am to 12:50 pm - Auto-deploying Anywhere and At Any Time
12:50 pm to 3:45 pm - Road to an SRE Model
3:45 pm to 7:00 pm - Automating Data Center Deployments

If you're an engineer interested in life at Shopify, Mike will be at SREcon: reach out to him through Twitter. To check out open roles or to learn more, head over to our Careers page.