Presentation: Service Ownership @Slack

As recently as 2017, developers at Slack didn’t carry a pager. They deployed to production over a hundred times a day, and a centralized operations team took the calls in the night. Most pages were not very actionable because they weren’t set up by the dev teams that knew their systems best. Heros and knowledge islands saved day over and over. Post-incident postmortems were poorly attended and did not encourage learning.     

Slowly, then quickly, all that changed. Slack moved to teams of empowered developers on-call, with embedded SREs, safer production deployments, and actionable alerts. Postmortems focus on learning, and meaningful analysis of incident patterns is done at all levels of the company.     

In this talk you’ll hear all about the bumps and scrapes, triumphs and pitfalls of our journey from a centralized ops team to development teams that own the full lifecycle of their systems. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t impossible. Hopefully, it will inspire you to try something radically different at your company too.