Productivity engineering at Netflix

Ship It! Cloud, SRE, Platform Engineering

What’s the difference between productivity engineering and platform engineering? How can you continue to re-platform with a moving target? On this episode, we’re joined by Andy Glover, who spent ten years productivity engineering at Netflix, to discuss.

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Sponsors:

• FireHydrant – The alerting and on-call tool designed for humans, not systems. Signals puts teams at the center, giving you ultimate control over rules, policies, and schedules. No need to configure your services or do wonky work-arounds. Signals filters out the noise, alerting you only on what matters. Manage coverage requests and on-call notifications effortlessly within Slack. But here’s the game-changer…Signals natively integrates with FireHydrant’s full incident management suite, so as soon as you’re alerted you can seamlessly kickoff and manage your entire incident inside a single platform. Learn more or switch today at firehydrant.com/signals
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

• Andy Glover – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Justin Garrison – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Autumn Nash – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

Links of the week

• Maybe you don’t need SRE
• Ex-Google Engineer Charged With Stealing A.I. Secrets for Chinese Firm

Interview

• ReadySet

WTA: What the Acronym?

• K8s - Kubernetes numeronym
• O11y - Observability
• I18n - internationalization
• A11y - accessibility
• Y2k - millennial tech problem

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Chapters

1. This is Ship It! (00:00:00)

2. The opener (00:00:52)

3. Sponsor: FireHydrant (00:21:23)

https://firehydrant.com/signals

4. ReadySet CTO Andy Glover (00:23:53)

5. Start-up vs big enterprise (00:24:41)

6. What is a platform engineer? (00:25:45)

7. How to pioneer (00:27:36)

8. Platform vs productivity (00:29:47)

9. Infrastructure boom (00:31:10)

10. Migration impacts (00:33:44)

11. Come talk to us! (00:39:31)

12. Learning from each other (00:40:44)

13. What kind of testing? (00:44:59)

14. Making the mistakes (00:47:45)

15. Saying no (00:52:04)

16. Tech is easy, people are hard (00:56:20)

17. Covid record breaking levels (00:58:25)

18. Alignment is important (01:00:39)

19. Netflix post-mortems (01:03:14)

20. Finding out value / Building a feedback loop (01:05:57)

21. Importance of human skills (01:11:57)

22. DonutBot (01:14:41)

23. Who are 3 people I need to meet? (01:15:48)

24. Make sure it works (01:16:36)

25. Where to reach out (01:18:49)

26. The closer (01:19:42)

27. Outro (01:30:19)