The document discusses the career of web operations and some of the challenges of the field. It outlines that web operations roles require expertise across many technical areas due to the multidisciplinary nature of the work. It emphasizes the importance of strong technical skills, experience making difficult decisions under pressure, and maintaining a calm demeanor in high-stress situations. Overall, the document promotes web operations as a critical career that will continue growing as services move increasingly online.

1. Web Operations: The Career
Theo Schlossnagle

2. Book

3. Theo Schlossnagle
• CEO of OmniTI
• Organizer of S.U.R.G.E.
– The scalability and performance conference

4. Why does web operations have it tough?
• All forms of business are now being conducted
on the internet
• Things move so fast and change significantly
• Roles are multidisciplinary experts
• There is no educational path

5. Strong background in computing
• Broad required understanding of architectural
components
– Helps understand the ins and outs of computing
systems
• Deep understanding
– Networks, routing, switching, firewalls, load
balancing, high availability, disaster recovery, TCP,
UDP, NOC management, hardware specifications,
different flavors of unix, several web server
technologies, caching technologies, storage
infrastructure, cryptography, algorithms, trending, and
capacity planning.

6. Practiced Decisiveness
• Being indecisive is a disadvantage
• Good judgment now
• There is a near-zero tolerance
• Delaying decisions causes prolonged outages

7. Calm Disposition
• Calm an controlled thought process is critical
• You need to make sure you’re on the right side
of the situation
• The goal is simply to make everything run all
the time

8. From Apprentice to Master

9. Knowledge
• Limiting yourself to the web for information is limiting
• You have peers and the need you as much as you need
them
• Book club
• Share information on user groups
• Its your job to retain as much information as possible
• The brain can sort, filter, and correlate all that trivia
into a concise and accurate picture used to power
decisions
• Log-term critical decisions of architecture design
• Momentary critical decision of fault remediation

10. Tools
• Tools
• One of the most incessantly and emphatically argued topics in
computing
– Vi xEmacs
– Subversion x GIT
– Etc
• Is in our nature to build tools
• Knowing your tools, regardless of the tools that are used, is a
prerequisite to mastering the trade
– Goes above and beyond mere competency
• Read the documentation for a tool during a crisis is not the best use
• You should strive to choose a tool based on its appropriateness for
the problem at hand

11. Experience
• One of the most powerful weapons in any situation
• Making good judgment
– It is gained by making bad ones
• Experience and Knowledge are quite interrelated
• Knowledge can be considered the studying of experience of
others
– Have the information but have not grasped the deeper meaning
that is gained by directly experiencing the casuality
• Gaining it is easy (and as hard) as doing it
• The larger the mistake, the more profund the opportunity
to extract deep and lasting value from the lesson
– Never allow the same bad judgement twice
– Not learning from one’s mistakes is inexcusable

12. SeniorOperations
• People presumptionisthatknowledgedictateshierarchical position
within a team
• The single biggestcharacteristic os a seniorengineer
– Isconsistentandsolidgoogjudgment
• Requiresexposuretosituationswherejudgmentisrequired
– Fasttrack
– 10 years
• Generation X and Y are culturesofimmediategratification
• Because I amsmart I gonnaplanmycareer path for 5 years
• The thruthisthatveryfewengineershavebeen in thefieldof web
operations for 15 years
• Be patient
• Thisadageisparadoxical, as yourpatienceverywellmayrun out
beforeyoucomprehend it

13. Discipline
• Laziness
• Doing things as correctly and efficiently as
possible you end up doing as little work as
possible to solve a particular problem
• Discipline is controlled behaviour resulting
training, study and practice
• Lack of discipline is the most commom
ingredient left out a web operations team
– Results in inconsistency and nonperformance

14. The career
• It isimportant for engineersparticipate in
sculptingwhat a career in operations look like
• The web isheretostay
• Services are becomingincreasinglycritical
• Web operationscareerisinevitable

15. Extras
www.slideshare.net/postwait/web-operations-career