Unicorn on-call :: DevOpsDays Portugal, Lisbon, 2019

1. Unicorn
On-call
DevOpsDays Portugal 2019, Lisbon

2. Unicorn
On-call
• DevOpsDays Portugal 2019, Lisbon

3. Unicorn
On-call
DevOpsDays Portugal 2019, Lisbon

4. Hi there! I’m Pedro!
• Engineering Director @
• Impact-driven person
• Passionate about People, Technology, and Products
• Agile, Lean and DevOps aficionado
• 10+ years of experience running engineering teams

5. On-call :: Definition
(of a person) able to be contacted in order to provide a
professional service if necessary, but not formally on duty.
‘The team is on call 24 hours-a-day, and is trained in resuscitation techniques and how to use live-saving defibrillators.’
‘If you work in a global organization, you might be on call 24 hours a day for troubleshooting or consulting.’
‘You have to get up in the middle of the night if you're on call.’

6. On-call :: You need
Shifts People Systems

7. On-call :: You need
Rotas People Systems

8. On-call :: You need
Rotas Heroes Systems

9. On-call :: You need
Rotas The
Critical Ones
Heroes

10. On-call :: Why
Customers Production
Systems
Engineers Company Job

11. Our On-call
journey (so far)

12. Choose your civilization
Greek
Egyptian
Mesopotamian
Asian

13. Stone Age
Town Center
200 (wood)

14. Stone Age
• Everyone was on-call (even the CEO)

15. Tool Age

16. Tool Age
• “Operations team” aka “DevOps team”
• “DevOps engineers” were on-call (not all of them)

17. Tool Age
• Officially we only had two engineers on-call

18. Tool Age
• 3 days rotas

19. Tool Age
• After business hours, everyone available on Slack would help out

20. Tool Age
• VictorOps

21. Tool Age
• Tons of alarms
• False positives (Broken windows theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory)
• MTTA not tracked
• MTTR “over 9000”
• All systems were on-call (Because none was… so all of them were)

22. Tool Age
• No compensation (voluntarily and pro-bono)

23. Tool Age
• Alarms in staging environments

25. Tool Age
• Fatigue and Burn out

26. Tool Age
• Churn

27. Tool Age
• Blameless PMs (PIs and PEs)

28. Bronze Age

29. Bronze Age
• We evaluated 3 scenarios: “Primary / Secondary”, “Just primary” and
“Primary / Secondary (SRE)”
• SRE team covering own rota (infra one) –> We rebranded the Ops
team to SRE team
• Development teams with rotas (dedicated to their systems)
• One engineer per rota (no secondaries)
• Engineers on-call (eat your own dog food: you develop it… you
maintain it in PROD!)

30. Bronze Age
• We had more than twenty engineers on-call

31. Bronze Age
• Tools: One hotspot per rota (no smartphones so that we don’t make
people carry two devices) + VictorOps App

32. Bronze Age
• One week rotas (four rotas in total)
• The rotas start / end every Tuesday (i.e. End-of-Sprint day) aligning
the rotas calendar with the sprints calendar

33. Bronze Age
• Only critical systems covered by the program (defined by Engineering
and agreed with stakeholders (e.g. Product, Customer Services,
Support))

34. Bronze Age
• On-call playbooks

35. Bronze Age
• Incident commander defined - The Incident Commander (IC) holds
the high-level state about the incident. They structure the incident
response task force, assigning responsibilities according to need and
priority

36. Bronze Age
• Weekly fire drills (or like Google calls it "Wheel of misfortune")

37. Bronze Age
• Compensation defined (money + time off). Flat fee. No compensation
per incident

38. Bronze Age
• Alarms fine tuned
• Defined time to Ack under 5 minutes
• Redefined thresholds
• Distinguished Alarms from Notifications: The alarm requires immediate
action. The notification can wait for the next day or so
• Cleaned up alarms from non Production environments

40. Bronze Age
• Volunteer based and not compulsory based (Yeah… we ran into
“trouble” and I went on-call because of that: eat your own dog food…
lead by example… I took 4 consecutive weeks on-call)

41. Bronze Age
• Engineers participating in multiple rotas
• Avoiding engineers doing rotas back to back

42. Bronze Age
• PTO/Vacations and unexpected leaves self-managed (with facilitation)
by each rota

43. Bronze Age
• Acacio’s list when joining the program (origin: internal meetup with
Acacio Cruz –> Google SRE and co-author of Google SRE book)

44. Bronze Age
• Shadowing when joining the program

45. Bronze Age
• Little time to work on the resiliency of systems (hard to prioritize and
hard to complete action points from PMs during sprints)

46. Bronze Age
• On-call procedure
• Updating the company’s status page
• Keeping the organization/stakeholders informed with the incident status
every 5 minutes

47. Bronze Age
• 24x7x365 coverage

48. Bronze Age
• Performance reviews completely disassociated from the on-call
program (no one gets a worst review because of not participating in
the program)

49. Bronze Age
• Although we have offices in different time zones we didn’t use a
“follow the sun” strategy (lack of engineers in the US)

50. Bronze Age
• P0s are all-hands on deck and we are “entitled” to call all engineers
that can help
• Panic button on slack with Zappier integration

51. Iron Age

52. Iron Age
• Vanguard program (thank you Raoul, Bruno, and Sean)

75. Iron Age
• Gamification

76. Iron Age
• On-call engineers stay off their regular sprint to work on Vanguard’s
backlog

77. Final thoughts

78. Final thoughts
• On-call doesn’t need to suck

79. Final thoughts
• Be fair
• Be honest
• Be respectful

80. Final thoughts
• Although the engineers are being paid to be on-call… don’t forget that
they are doing us a favor!

81. Final thoughts
• Don’t aim for perfection and don’t overthink things… Any start is
better than none

82. Final thoughts
• Google SRE book is a great inspiration (and an herculean task to read
the entire book… 552 pages!)

83. Final thoughts
• #oncallselfie

84. Final thoughts
• Burnout is a real thing… it affects performance and churn… but most
importantly… health!

85. Final thoughts
• Tune those alarms! It’s one of the main factors of success!

86. Final thoughts
• Don’t make rushed decisions because you are getting too many alerts
(e.g. turning off alarms)

87. Final thoughts
• Take advantage of the business hours (when you have the entire
engineering team at the office) to tackle issues that might come up
during out-of-business hours (when you “only” have the on-call
engineers available)

88. Final thoughts
• Being on-call doesn’t mean that you need to save the world. We don’t
need “Rambos”… so play it safe, stick to the playbooks and don’t
make risky decisions under stress

89. Final thoughts
• Don’t hesitate to jump into a (video) call to coordinate the incident
resolution (usually Slack is not enough) – sync vs async comms

90. Final thoughts
• Don’t forget to keep the stakeholders in the loop (we are in the heat
zone… but they are suffering from the sideline… and they need to
know what is happening)

91. Final thoughts
• Action items on (Blameless) post mortems should be tracked and
assured that they are executed

92. Final thoughts
• Don’t fall into the wishful thinking game: if you believe/suspect that
an alarm is triggered by something harmless that you “can’t control”
(e.g. network glitch)… be ready to prove that… otherwise don’t stop
investigating the root cause

93. Final thoughts
• Always write PMs (for PEs and PIs) and bare in mind that you should
have public versions of the PM (sooner or later your customers will
ask for them)

94. Thank you
DevOpsDays Portugal 2019, Lisbon