Overview
On this episode of Unlearn Podcast, Barry O’Reilly hosts Anurag Gupta, founder and CEO of Shoreline, a product that helps reliability engineers reduce the “heavy lifting of dealing with incidents” so they can focus on improving their systems. Anurag is a notable leader in the reliability space: his experience includes joining Oracle in its infancy, and over seven years at AWS, where he ran their analytics and relational database services. In this episode, he explores the importance of embracing failure, creating a blameless culture, and sharing knowledge to build more reliable and resilient systems.
Anurag saw an area of non-consumption in the cloud infrastructure space which led him to found Shoreline. Based on his experience at AWS, he realized that people care most about having their cloud infrastructure systems up all the time, which is hard to achieve. Most companies spend three times more on people to manage their system than on the system itself. Anurag says that 50-90% of what they do in production ops could be automated. Thus, Shoreline aims to free up companies from “keeping the lights on” so that they can redeploy their time and money into innovation. Anurag and Barry O’Reilly discuss the growing conversation around resilient systems engineering and human factors, and how to apply the lessons learned in other industries to software development.