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Firefighting - strategies for on call and incident management

Abstract:

If you’re involved with ops then it’s pretty likely you’ll experience an outage and be paged to deal with an incident. How quickly a situation is resolved really depends on the processes in place to deal with stressful situations. This talk will look at how to properly deal with incidents, including tips and tricks for designing an on-call system:

• Designing a process to deal with incidents, tracking their progress to resolution. Systems which work whether it’s work hours or the middle of the night make a difference to how quickly a situation is resolved.

• Strategies for creating on-call rotations, when on call should switch over, how to do a proper hand off, dealing with fatigue and tools to help with this.

• Ideas for writing an operations handbook for how to deal with common alerts for quick reference during incidents.

• How on-call and incident management fits into the development, release and testing process to ensure the relevant people are contactable in an emergency

• How the process changes from the early days of a startup through to larger companies with dedicated teams.

The talk will look at some general concepts but will focus on real world examples, with hints and tips to ensure everyone can take away useful ideas and things to implement themselves.

Speaker:

David Mytton is the founder of Server Density, a SaaS tool which helps you provision and monitor your infrastructure. Based in the UK, David has been programming in Python and PHP for over 10 years and founded the London MongoDB user group having deployed one of the earliest and longest running production MongoDB clusters, now processing over 25TB of data each month. This includes scaling Server Density from a single VPS to over 150 servers, deployed across multiple data centres on both dedicated and cloud infrastructure.