Play how you practice—in music and with your SRE team

Bringing music concepts to SRE: Practice can make (nearly) perfect

Music and IT may seem to be at opposite ends of a spectrum, but in reality, they have much in common if you know where to look. In this episode, Mike Kavis talks with Matt Davis, staff infrastructure engineer at Blameless, about how practice methods in music can aid in building great SRE teams and site reliability in general. According to Matt, it’s all about how you practice for the real thing: If your practices are good, and you can improvise, your SRE performance will top the charts.

Improvisation—it's not just limited to music. It is...intuition that we lean upon to perform in pressurized situations…like being in the middle of an incident.

Matt Davis is a staff engineer at Blameless. He enjoys operating inherently chaotic complex systems. His expertise brings to bear a variegated background including data-center operations, storage hardware and distributed databases, IT security, site reliability, support services, observability systems, and TechOps leadership.

Disclaimer: As referenced in this podcast, “Amazon” refers to AWS (Amazon Web Services) and “Google” refers to GCP (Google Cloud Platform).

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