Industry Leaders

Lessons from Google, Netflix, NASA & Beyond

Industry Leaders | Technical Operations Excellence

50%
Google Eng Cap
100s
Netflix Deploys/Day
5
HRO Principles
6
AWS Pillars

Google SRE Principles

PrincipleApplication
50% RuleMax 50% time on ops/toil
Error BudgetsBalance reliability vs velocity
SLO-basedObjective reliability targets
BlamelessFocus on systems, not people

class SRE implements interface DevOps

Netflix Chaos Engineering

"Avoid failure by failing constantly"

ToolWhat It Does
Chaos MonkeyRandomly kills instances
Latency MonkeyInjects network delays
Chaos GorillaSimulates AZ failure

2014 AWS outage: 10% of servers affected; Netflix ran uninterrupted

SRE Evolution

EraPeriodFocus
Chaos Years1990-2005Cowboy ops
DevOps2005-2015Automation
SRE2014-2018Reliability
Platform2018-NowDeveloper UX

Tool Evolution

  • 2000s: Nagios, Puppet, Chef
  • 2010s: Docker, K8s, Prometheus, Terraform
  • 2020s: OpenTelemetry, GitOps, AI/ML Ops

Industry Best Practices

CompanyKey Contribution
AmazonWell-Architected (6 pillars)
MetaProduction Eng, SEV culture
SpotifySquads/Tribes, golden paths
ToyotaKaizen, Jidoka, JIT

Mission-Critical Lessons

IndustryLesson
NASAChecklists, redundancy, simulation
AviationCrew resource mgmt, near-miss analysis
NuclearDefense in depth, safety culture
FinanceUltra-low latency, compliance

High-Reliability Orgs

5 principles from aviation, nuclear, healthcare:

  • Preoccupation with Failure
  • Reluctance to Simplify
  • Sensitivity to Operations
  • Commitment to Resilience
  • Deference to Expertise

See HRO Pattern Recognition for deep dive

Key Takeaways

  • Automate everything: Eliminate manual toil
  • Embrace failure: Practice makes resilient
  • Measure what matters: SLOs drive decisions
  • Culture first: Blameless enables learning

Learn from the Best

Adopt practices, not just tools.