The conclusion of the two part crossover podcast series explores the intersection of AI with sustainable IT operations featuring Jerry Cuomo from The Art of AI and Kevin Yu from Making of the SRE Omelette. The discussion delves into practical measures for more efficient energy use in AI systems, emphasizing the need for data and the analysis of past behavior to inform energy-efficient decision-making. Jerry and Kevin highlight the importance of balancing AI and human inputs to achieve meaningful tasks and improve overall quality of products. Discuss challenges such as right-sizing compute and recognize the pivotal role of data in addressing these issues, advocating for a data-driven approach to answer critical questions and provide necessary context for decision-making. Additionally, the conversation touches on the future of AI and sustainable IT operations, emphasizing the need for diverse perspectives and the integration of SRE and sustainability as standard practices in software development. The podcast aims to provide a better understanding of how AI intersects with sustainable IT operations and how innovation can be approached responsibly. Please be sure to catch Part 1 on Jerry's Art of AI podcast.
Mike Hollinger, Master Inventor, CTO for Applied AI & Distinguished Engineer for Maximo Application Suite talks about how we can leverage operational insights from assets, facilities and infrastructure to drive clean energy transition and decarbonization. Mike shares stories from customers that showcases successes as well as challenges they faced. Mike have a call to action to inspire Site Reliability Engineers to embrace the data and capabilities we have at our fingertips today to turn data into action to achieve the sustainable future. Things to listen for: [02:20 - 03:25] Mike's career path that led to his current role [03:59 - 05:47] Meaning of sustainability to Mike [07:56 - 10:06] Sustainability movement over last few years [10:18 - 11:41] Importance of driving action from data [12:04 - 15:45] Challenges in Facilities and Assets [16:28 - 18:07] Civil Infrastructure example that drive action from data [20:40 - 22:19] What Mike considers as success [22:50 - 23:39] Importance of driving action from data [26:06 - 29:34] Suggestion for c-suite executives to take action [30:15 - 34:24] Call to action for SREs [38:32 - 41:03] Mike's ingredient & recipe for a Sustainable Future
Mike Hollinger, Master Inventor, CTO for Applied AI & Distinguished Engineer for Maximo Application Suite talks about how we can leverage operational insights from assets, facilities and infrastructure to drive clean energy transition and decarbonization. Mike shares stories from customers that showcases successes as well as challenges they faced. Mike have a call to action to inspire Site Reliability Engineers to embrace the data and capabilities we have at our fingertips today to turn data into action to achieve the sustainable future. Things to listen for: [02:20 - 03:25] Mike's career path that led to his current role [03:59 - 05:47] Meaning of sustainability to Mike [07:56 - 10:06] Sustainability movement over last few years [10:18 - 11:41] Importance of driving action from data [12:04 - 15:45] Challenges in Facilities and Assets [16:28 - 18:07] Civil Infrastructure example that drive action from data [20:40 - 22:19] What Mike considers as success [22:50 - 23:39] Importance of driving action from data [26:06 - 29:34] Suggestion for c-suite executives to take action [30:15 - 34:24] Call to action for SREs [38:32 - 41:03] Mike's ingredient & recipe for a Sustainable Future
Have you struggled to convince others of your idea? Be it to tackle a reliability problem or a sustainability challenge. In this episode, I have a conversation with Danny Fontaine - host of the Podcast Pitch Master on how to pitch SRE and Sustainability ideas. Danny shared one of his favorite stories - the origin of the elevator pitch to get us started - and continued with many others including how he changed the paradigm of a customer by surprising them with a fictional scenario and won the deal. Listen in as Danny transforms how you think about presenting and help you persuade others of your ideas. Things to listen for: [02:01 - 03:16] Danny pitching himself [06:48 - 09:28] Meaning of pitching [12:24 - 16:39] The origin story of the elevator pitch [16:54 - 18:57] How Danny get ready for pitching [21:44 - 27:32] Pitching for Sustainability [28:38 - 32:52] Pitching against detractors [34:31 - 37:42] Pitching for head of IT vs. Business [38:23 - 40:04] Danny's ingredient and recipe for pitching
Have you struggled to convince others of your idea? Be it to tackle a reliability problem or a sustainability challenge. In this episode, I have a conversation with Danny Fontaine - host of the Podcast Pitch Master on how to pitch SRE and Sustainability ideas. Danny shared one of his favorite stories - the origin of the elevator pitch to get us started - and continued with many others including how he changed the paradigm of a customer by surprising them with a fictional scenario and won the deal. Listen in as Danny transforms how you think about presenting and help you persuade others of your ideas. Things to listen for: [02:01 - 03:16] Danny pitching himself [06:48 - 09:28] Meaning of pitching [12:24 - 16:39] The origin story of the elevator pitch [16:54 - 18:57] How Danny get ready for pitching [21:44 - 27:32] Pitching for Sustainability [28:38 - 32:52] Pitching against detractors [34:31 - 37:42] Pitching for head of IT vs. Business [38:23 - 40:04] Danny's ingredient and recipe for pitching
Design transforms the human experience with technology - including the experience for Site Reliability Engineers. And enduring Sustainable results are only achieved when we consider Sustainability in the entire solution life cycle beginning with Design. In this episode, I have a conversation with Erin Buonomo, Executive Director of Design and Chris Hammond, Distinguished Designer of IBM Sustainability Software on how the SRE discipline can embrace Design for a better experience for Site Reliability Engineers and clients we support - as well as how we partner up to achieve our Sustainability goals. Erin & Chris encourages the SRE practitioners to introduce ourselves into dialogs everyday. To be that extra leg on the stool, to not only share our perspectives of achieving Sustainable goals, but also to educate others of the practice of SRE. The goal is to achieve "Sustainability Consciousness" - where it is part of everyday decisions, how we do business and part of our culture. Things to listen for: [03:37 - 04:58] Reason for having the conversation between SRE & Design [05:40 - 09:23] Meaning of Sustainability to Chris & Erin [09:49 - 15:48] AS-IS state [16:06 - 21:09] How we get to the TO-BE state [21:33 - 25:36] How do we know we have arrived at this future? [25:59 - 28:57] How SRE can partner w/ Design [32:35 - 34:55] Erin & Chris' ingredient & recipe to embrace design for a sustainable future
If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. This applies to SRE as well as Sustainability. Salil Narayanan - CTO of Envizi captures what it takes to start the Sustainability journey by taking action from reporting. Salil had the foresight of carbon footprint impact management back in 2003 and co-founded Omni Meta - which became Envizi. He shares stories over the past 20 years in this space, tips to good visibility and how legislatures have influenced the industry. Salil also gives a call to action for Site Reliability Engineers and all practitioners on embracing the entrepreneurial spirit to drive value for customers and businesses we support. Things to listen for: [01:19 - 04:37] Salil's journey to the CTO role [06:42 - 08:58] Biggest challenge faced by customers [11:19 - 14:49] Step after getting data [14:57 - 16:40] Action on the data [17:13 - 19:21] Meaning of Sustainability in the context of SRE [19:31 - 21:05] Sustainability as it relates to energy footprint and efficiency [21:39 - 22:49] Stories from the field [24:06 - 26:27] Embrace entrepreneurial spirit for SRE [27:07 - 27:55] Salil's ingredient and recipe to turn reporting into actions
Rishi Vaish, VP and CTO of IBM Sustainability Software takes us through Sustainability by the Numbers to give us context and scope of the impact of climate change and why we need to act now. Rishi also gives concrete examples of what we can do to make a difference. In addition, he has a call to action for Site Reliability Engineers - from questions to get us to think of sustainability from the start, as well as considerations to be more sustainable from our roles. For example: what is your take on sustainability as it relates to energy footprint and efficiency? do you know how many of your development environments are running when no-one is using it? Things to listen for: [02:04 - 03:05] What sustainability means to Rishi [03:21 - 07:33] Sustainability by the Numbers [08:02 - 09:06] Was there an aha moment for companies to act now? [10:42 - 11:38] Carrot and Stick [12:01 - 14:34] Call to Action - Infrastructure footprint opportunities [18:16 - 19:51] Call to Action - Hardware opportunities [21:33 - 23:55] Call to action - development environment opportunities [24:37 - 25:57] How to get started - for CSO [26:10 - 27:35] Guidance for Site Reliability Engineers [28:02 - 29:08] Rishi's Omelette Recipe
Sustainability is no longer just an ambition, over the last few years, we’re starting to see companies actively doing things and changing their behaviours to be more sustainable. Suzanne Livingston, VP of Development & Reliability Engineering at IBM Sustainability Software takes the audience through the journey of building a solution that is reliable and sustainable from day one. She also shares insights on why Sustainability is the focus of companies today, success stories with customers she has worked with and what IBM is doing to help their customers to achieve sustainability goals. Lastly, Suzanne gives practical advices on how companies and organization can get started right away and take steps closer to realizing their sustainability goals. Things to listen for [01:48 - 03:44] Suzanne's role [04:09 - 11:00] What sustainability means to Suzanne [11:38 - 15:11] Why now? [15:29 - 21:39] How IBM is helping companies to achieve their sustainability goals [22:13 - 24:09] How to get started [25:01 - 28:38] How to drive innovation in sustainability [29:11 - 30:02] Suzanne's ingredient and recipe for companies to achieve their sustainability goals
If you’re listening for the first time and wonder what does an Omelette has to do with SRE - it is based on the analogy that Culture is the outcome of what we do - so in the context of the chicken or the egg. It is like an Omelette. In season 1 of the show, we focused the culture and practice to achieve the reliability engineering outcome. Season two is all about how the practice of Site Reliability Engineering can play a big part in helping and leading us to a more sustainable future. Sustainability is a popular topic these days - but what exactly is Sustainability? What is this ESG thing? And why the buzz now? Join us to demystify Sustainability and kick off Season 2 is Christina Shim. Christina explains sustainability as leaving the planet better than we are now - meet today's needs and also making sure demands of tomorrow can be met as well. She explains the ESG framework and goes to highlight we shouldn't let the conversation stop at what fits into the bucket of ESG. Christina has a set of call to actions for all of us to take at the personal, team and organization level to make a difference now. Listen in as we take on the pledge to arrive at a more sustainable future. IBM 2022 Impact Report --> https://www.ibm.com/impact/2022-ibm-impact-report Things to listen for: [01:58 - 04:51] Christina's journey that led her to the impactful role [06:15 - 10:48] Sustainability Explained [11:47 - 14:25] What is ESG? [15:23 - 18:01] Why now? [18:15 - 19:33] Do companies only act because of regulations? [19:56 - 21:01] Would consumers buy a sustainability product if it is more expensive? [21:22 - 21:56] The sustainable future [22:15 - 25:54] How to get started? [26:52 - 27:50] Christina's Sustainability Omelette
Preview of season 2 of the Making of the SRE Omelette podcast. Sustainability is front and center of many conversations today - from boardroom to living rooms. But does being sustainable simply mean reducing carbon footprint or does it mean more? In season 2 of the podcast, we will talk to experts to understand the meaning of sustainability, the outcome we should be targeting. And how the practice of Site Reliability Engineering can help and lead us to achieve those outcomes. So join Kevin and his guests as they crack some plant based eggs, add some ESG and turn sustainability ambition into reality.
Marion provides advice for managers and leaders to create a safe environment to foster innovation and teamwork with a diverse team in this episode - and a creative way to tackle technical debt. Managers provide leadership, support and mentorship to their teams - they help employees reach their goals and shelter them from unnecessary distractions to help them focus. Marion shares with the SRE community challenges she has observed from her team, as well as issues experienced as a manager - including much more toil. Marion gives perspectives of an effective team and what can be done to assemble and maintain it. In addition, advices for how practitioners can balance maintaining SLA/SLO, backlogs and keeping up with education and trends in the industry for career progression. Lastly, Marion summarizes with a fantastic recipe for the SRE Omelette for a well managed SRE team. Things to listen for: [01:51 - 04:43] Marion's career journey [05:15 - 08:15] What led to the manager role [09:01 - 12:02] Toil in the manager role [14:00 - 16:13] Marion talk about team's challenge [16:35 - 18:35] Challenge as a manager [20:03 - 23:24] Composition of an effective team [24:06 - 26:15] Recognizing people who prevented fires [26:25 - 29:22] What it means to be a good manager [30:16 - 34:51] How to help the team with building their skills [35:13 - 38:54] How to get into the profession [41:08 - 46:18] The future of SRE [46:43 - 48:57] Marion's ingredient and recipe for SRE Omelette
In this bonus episode, Kyle shares his secret ingredient to make Omelette or anything taste extra great. As well as his two favorite styles of Omelette and their recipe.
This episode is about transforming SRE into how we do business and incorporate Reliability Engineering into the process of building products and features. Kyle Brown, IBM Fellow, VP, CTO for the CIO join us in this episode to talk about this mindset shift. Kyle discusses how Reliability Engineering can be considered in the entire solution lifecycle, how to get there and what it looks like. Kyle also shares his insights for engineers to progress in their career and where Reliability Engineering will become in the future. Lastly, as an avid chef, Kyle also shares with us recipe for a real Omelette in a bonus episode! Things to listen for: [01:31 - 05:04] What SRE means to Kyle [05:42 - 11:17] Reliability Engineering is a life cycle effort [11:57 - 15:50] Kyle's take on Non-Functional-Requirements [22:04 - 26:02] Would we get to self-running business? [26:54 - 33:19] How to get started to get to the SRE culture [33:38 - 40:46] Kyle's insights for growing your career [41:44 - 44:51] Kyle recipe for the SRE Omelette
A three-legged stool will not wobble and is stable even on an uneven surface. In this episode, we listen to three Site Reliability Engineers working together to deliver client and business success. Abhay Choudhary, Andrew Lindsay, and Ashley Tate share their journeys that led to the roles they're in today in Data Science, Observability and Automation. The three disciplines resemble a three-legged stool that enables a stable progression for improving solution reliability. Conversations also took us to what they enjoy the most about their jobs and what they'd prefer to do less of. Abhay, Andrew and Ashley also share with the audience their tips to get started in the SRE profession and ingredients to achieve the SRE outcome. Things to Listen for: [02:55 - 06:23] Andrew, Abhay and Ashley's journey that led them to the current role [06:43 - 13:46] Abhay, Ashley and Andrew sharing what they enjoy the most about what they do [13:58 - 18:44] Andrew, Ashley and Abhay sharing what they like to do less of [19:17 - 21:04] Abhay's ah-ha moment for data science [21:41 - 23:03] Andrew's ah-ha moment for observability [23:51 - 25:43] Ashley's ah-ha moment - art of asking for help [26:35 - 30:35] Ashley, Andrew and Abhay's tip for people getting into SRE [31:08 - 33:28] The SRE Omelette ingredient and recipe from Andrew, Abhay and Ashley
SRE is a team sport - without assists from team members, business and client successes would not be possible. Bill shares how we can be successful via learning, knowing the indicators to ask for help and how to foster an environment where people feel safe to ask for help. Lastly, his ingredient and recipe on building a high performing team. Listen in to Bill and let's level up on your teamwork! Things to Listen for: [03:58 - 05:56] Bill's Teamwork make AI work story [08:44 - 10:48] The art of learning [11:49 - 16:11] Art of asking for help [17:03 - 18:57] Culture to foster environment that is safe to ask for help [19:56 - 24:40] What makes a great team [27:57 - 31:12] Ingredient and recipe for teamwork
Enterprise Design Thinking has positively influenced how companies build products that deliver happy user experience. Can the same practice and mindset be applied to SRE? And if so, How? Join us to discuss this topic is Karel Vredenburg. Karel is the VP of client insights and research at IBM. He is a great champion of tech vitality and has tremendous industry experiences improving the user experience of human interface to technology. Listen in and hear Karel’s journey that transformed IBM, clients, c-suite executives, and academia to embrace Enterprise Design Thinking to creatively solve problems and surface designs that lead to happy users. Things to Listen for: [01:40 - 02:54] What is Enterprise Design Thinking [03:08 - 05:00] What building software was like before EDT [05:00 - 07:41] Karel's ah-ha moment [08:22 - 12:33] EDT can be used to solve all kinds of challenges, including SRE [12:39 - 14:04] How we embrace EDT [14:44 - 16:38] What's next [17:17 - 18:01] How we help teams who don't have full-time designer staffing [18:38 - 20:50] Karel's ingredient and recipe for happy users
Storytelling helps with learning because engaging stories are easy to remember and are interesting. David shares why he influenced the IBM CIO to learn from incidents via Story Telling and how other organization can follow this model to learn more about how the systems work and improve business and client success. Listen to this episode to gain ideas on how you can turn your incident learning into an engaging session people look forward to attend and drive the outcome of better business and client success.
Humanity have an enduring desire to explore space - it has led us to push the boundaries of science and technology. Our guest today, Robert Barron has found an amazing connection between space exploration and SRE. I like to think he takes us to where no SRE has gone before! Robert shares with us his favourite stories that draws parallel from Lunar Landing, Shuttle, space exploration to SRE. He also gives what SRE can take as inspiration from "Failure Is Not an Option" to build systems.
Crystal ball shows that the future of SRE is with AI & ML, having self monitoring, self healing, self managing and self optimizing. Essentially autopilot of operations. While we all appreciate and look forward to that, many people are not sure of the difference between automation and AI. If we all have tasks driven by automation... is that AIOps or is the AI of the future more than that? To help us demystify AI and AIOps is Isabell Sippli. Isabell is the STSM at IBM AIOps and she has fielded many of those questions in her journey to enable clients with AIOps. Timestamps: [00:00 - 00:27] AIOps differentiator [13:19 - 17:44] How to embrace AIOps [17:45 - 19:53] Future of AIOps [23:43 - 24:04] Isabelle's ingredient and recipe to embrace AIOps