Abstract

SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) are the software engineers responsible for ensuring that all of Google’s services are super reliable and super fast, all of the time. I’ll be talking generally about what SREs do, and the technical challenges involved in running a fault-tolerant and reliable service at Google scale, how outages happen and how to prevent them. Then I’ll go into more detail about two of Google’s distributed storage systems, BigTable and Spanner, the principles they were built on and how they work to store and serve data at scale, and how they break.

Short Bio: Starting in Sydney as a Software Engineer on Google Docs, Katie has been working at Google for 6 years. After 3 of those years she trained as a Site Reliability Engineer and started working on Google’s large scale storage systems which store data for many of Google’s products. She later moved to Google in Switzerland where she is continuing as an SRE working on the storage systems for Google+.