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About the guest:Sasha Rosenbaum is Principal at a new venture, Ergonautic. With a degree in Computer Science, an MBA, and two decades of experience across development, operations, product management, and technical sales, Sasha brings a unique perspective to optimizing the organizational flow of work, bridging gaps with empathy and insight.Find our guest on:TwitterLinkedInMastodonFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:ErgonauticDevOpsDevOps Days ChicagoFileZilla[Video] “Single Person of Failure” by Sasha RosenbaumGoogle SRE BookAndrew Clay ShaferTranscript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Adriana Villela, with my awesome co-host...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today we are talking to Sasha Rosenbaum, who is a Founder at Ergonautic. Welcome, Sasha.SASHA: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. And it's a pleasure to be chatting with you all on this podcast.ADRIANA: Yeah, we're super excited to have you. So first things first, what are you drinking today?SASHA: I'm drinking peppermint tea. And this is a funny story; I recently became allergic to black tea.ADRIANA: [gasps] Oh no.SASHA: Which I previously drank all my life. I didn't even know you could be allergic to black tea. So now it's either coffee or I try to find some type of herbal thing. [laughs]ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh my goodness. At least it sounds like you've found a nice alternative. SASHA: Yeah, I have so many variations of herbal teas. It's not even funny. ADRIANA: [laughs]SASHA: Because I keep trying them all, and I can never quite find one that I'm committed to, so it's just a whole big cabinet of tea.ANA: [laughs] I am sorry for you having to not have access to black tea anymore. I think that's always been my favorite, like, oolong tea/black tea, and especially when you get to combo it with a peach or a mint on top, like summertime. But I'm glad that you can still drink coffee because I know for some folks, it's like they have to cut off tea and coffee.SASHA: Yeah, it's funny because the hardest part is people don't usually have hot drinks that aren't tea and coffee. So I'm like, if it's like 8:00 p.m., I'm not going to drink coffee, so I'm stuck with water.ANA: [laughs] Fair enough.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's sad. That's sad.ANA: I'm very close to Sasha's drink. I'm having something called a mint mojito. There's a coffee shop in the Bay Area called Philz Coffee. And this is one of their most common drinks where it's like you get a latte, but they also muddle mint into it, and they make it really sweet with a lot of foam. So that was kind of what I was feeling this morning.ADRIANA: Nice. Nice. I did not go with anything creative. I just have my water here.ANA: And it's too early for boba tea for you.ADRIANA: I know, right? Yeah, I think the places don't open until at least 11:00 if I'm lucky. Otherwise, I have to wait till noon or make my own. [laughs]SASHA: Oh no. Oh, can you make your own? I've never tried making my own boba tea.ADRIANA: It's not bad. Like, you can get the pearls on Amazon, and you just boil them for like one or two minutes. And if you want, you can soak them in honey or brown sugar, and it's actually pretty good.SASHA: Nice. You know what I like? The new ones are like jelly, so lychee jelly or something like that. And it's just like, I like it more than boba because boba is so giant. [laughs]ADRIANA: Yeah, that's true, and it's filling too. They pile so much on. I'm like, oh my God, I'm like eating my drink. [laughs]SASHA: It's a whole snack.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly.ANA: I'm insane, and I like it when it's boba and then lychee like jelly. It's just like the double whammy of it.ADRIANA: It's a good combo.SASHA: Any drink that has lychee in it, I'm all for it. [laughs]ADRIANA: Me too. Oh, I'm such a huge fan. Whenever I find the fresh lychees at the supermarket, I'm like, oooh, give me, give me, give me because they're so, like, it's seasonal here. I don't know how accessible it is where y'all live, but here, I think I can find it in February and maybe one week in the summer.ANA: We definitely don't have too much access to it here. I think I had more access to it in Miami and in Central America. But I want to say in Downtown San Francisco, most shops always carry lychee, which is actually pretty neat because I'm like, I prefer this over anything else.ADRIANA: Oh yes.ANA: Or when you go to froyo shops, they have boba, but it's the popping kind, and it's got little like bursts.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's right.ANA: Then, at Target, I just saw that they're selling pre-made boba, and it comes with those like popping boba. So I bought it for my partner's kids, and we've yet to have it.ADRIANA: Oooh.ANA: But it comes in a little four-pack pre-made boba, and I was like, that's fun.ADRIANA: That's awesome, little family activity.ANA: Yeah. [laughs] For taco night, my plan was we'll do tacos, and then we'll have these as desserts. [laughs]ADRIANA: That's awesome. [laughs]ANA: Well, Sasha, we'll actually get started on some of the questions that we have for you today as much as we love talking to you about your love for herbal teas. [laughter] The first question that I'm sure some of our listeners are wondering, like, how is it that you got your start in tech? We know that you've gotten a chance to work at various companies. But it's always nice to hear how folks were like, ooh, this seems interesting. Let me take a look.SASHA: So I'm actually, like, I'm probably at this point an unusual woman in tech in the sense that I've been here almost 20 years. And I actually have a computer science degree, so it's like a more conventional path rather than switching careers. But I did actually switch. So I was getting the same message in high school as everybody else that computer science isn't for girls and that kind of stuff. And so what I initially enrolled in university was biology, and I wanted to do genetics. And the first year in biology, basically, I realized the entire degree is like growing yeast and such things in a lab. [laughter]So you do genetic experiments, which sounds really, really cool. But to modify these genes, you grow fruit flies, and yeast, and then mice, and stuff like that. And I'm like, you have to proceed to like Ph.D. to like...and the whole time, this is what you do. You show up every day to your lab, and you're like, feed mice something. [laughs] And I'm like, this doesn't sound like a career I want to have. ANA: [laughs]SASHA: So I kind of went...and my university was extremely technical, so I went through the entire list. And it was like, chemical engineering, physical engineering, industrial engineering, this, this, and this. And then there was computer science. And I did one Pascal class in school that was really basic Pascal, and I was like, I kind of like that. So this was like, click a button, switch to computer science. But then the moment I was there, it was so fun because it was like basically playing games.What I love about computer science is you start with nothing, like, this blank slate, you know, empty editor. And then you create something that actually produces results, and that is just magical. It's super creative. You have a lot of freedom in how you structure things, and what language you use, what architecture you use. So it was always like, super, super fun to do. That's how I get started. And then, I was a developer for many years. And then I gradually got into...I did some ops in the beginning, and then I basically got into the DevOps movement. So that kind of shifted my career towards more opsy, SRE kind of conversation. I think I've held every role that you can imagine. So I was a product manager for a minute. And I've been in sales. I've been in DevRel, which to some people, it's marketing and to some people, it's not. So basically, I feel like I've been in every department of the organization but always something tech-related.ADRIANA: You talked about getting involved in the DevOps movement. I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into that. And specifically, how have you seen the DevOps movement evolve since you jumped on it? And follow up to that is are you happy with how it's progressed?SASHA: I got involved...I think it was 2013. So technically, the first conference was 2009, so it was probably about four or five years later, but it was still not a thing. So when people talked about DevOps, like, if you look...there's in Google search results how does search for a certain word change over time. And so the search for DevOps was, like, from 2009 to 2014, it was near flat. And then it kind of starts spiking because people got more and more interested in the term. The devopsdays.org kind of spread the word and started popping conferences all over the world. So I was a speaker at DevOpsDays Chicago, I think, in 2013, and then I became an organizer in 2014. And in 2013, it was the fifth city that did DevOpsDays, and now there's like, I don't know, over 80, something crazy. So it's all over the world. It's everywhere. So I think there have been a lot of changes in how it started, and how it progressed, and where it is now. What we started with was basically a lot of talk about collaboration and a lot of talk about automation. So it was two things, like, one is aligning incentives, so you stop kind of chasing two different agendas. Basically, you know, and I'm sure your listeners know, that developers want to deliver faster, ops want to keep the lights on, so minimize change. And then there's this inherent conflict between the team.So the first conversation in DevOpsDays, how do we minimize this conflict? How do we make everybody speak the same language, understand that they're incentivized to do the same thing, which is delivering software to their customers successfully? Then it evolved to people started creating roles for DevOps, which at the beginning was a big no-no for us. I had one of my co-organizers refuse to take a job at a company as the director of DevOps until they renamed the role because he was like, DevOps is not a team.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: Yes.SASHA: And I'm not going to work here.ADRIANA: [laughs]SASHA: We have definitely lost that fight. DevOps is now a team.ADRIANA: Yeah, that makes me cry.[laughter]SASHA: So I will say on the bright side, the DevOps teams we did kind of create a job. So, in addition to...because DevOps teams don't exactly do what ops team did and they don't exactly do what dev teams did, so it's kind of like this new set of skills that were defined by this movement. The DevOps term also got co-opted by everyone, and their, like, every company selling a product in this space wanted to say they sell DevOps.ANA: [laughs]SASHA: And so every day I read some article saying that DevOps is dead [laughter] and usually to start an argument. Usually, someone defines DevOps as whatever they want, so they're like, DevOps is all about culture, or DevOps is only CI/CD tools, or DevOps is this. And then this is why it doesn't work. It's like, okay if you define the word to be whatever you want it to be, you can argue against the concept and practice. And then I think the first couple years that SRE became popular, I was kind of like, oh, you're just renaming this thing to another term. But I've come around because SRE actually defines metrics that allow you to reason. So we talked about incentives, and the incentives are great while you can talk, while you can collaborate, and everybody can be in the same room, and they can communicate with each other. But over time, in the larger organization, that's kind of hard to maintain. If you can attach metrics to it that allow you to reason about this conversation, it makes it easier. So SRE did bring a lot to the table as, in practice, you can implement with SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets and all these things that kind of allow you to discuss what the trade-offs are, which is really important. I think the unfortunate part of it is a lot of organizations just rename the team to whatever the buzzword is. So ops has been renamed to DevOps; it's been renamed to SRE. Now it's been renamed to platform engineering, whatever comes next. And they don't change any of the practices. So how do you expect to get better results? Like, you say you're SRE...one example is so many organizations are like, we are an SRE team. I'm like, okay, what's an error budget?ANA: [laughs]SASHA: And either they don't have an error budget at all. They don't even know what it is. Or they have a pretty slide saying error budgets are this. They don't have it defined. Or the next one is they have it defined, but no one looks at it. And if you blow the error budget, no one stops development, and they just proceed as normal. I'm like, so you're calling yourself SRE based on what exactly? ADRIANA: Right. [laughter]SASHA: It's like, I'm monitoring alerts [laughter] like we did 20 years ago, oh no.ADRIANA: It's like fancyops at that rate, right? SASHA: Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of fancyops around it. And so I had this moment, I don't know, three years ago, whatever, somewhere during or before the pandemic. ANA: [laughs]SASHA: I had this moment where I came to my co-organizers of DevOpsDays Chicago, and I'm like, "I feel like we didn't do anything. We're having the same conversations for ten years. Nothing changes. Everything is sucking in the same way." And they're like, "No, no, no, you're wrong." My job used to suck. Like, my job used to be I had a once in six months deploy. It took me all weekend. I was on-call for it at 2:00 a.m., and no one cared about my well-being. And developers were like, "We don't care about operations and whatever." And now I get to implement tools and practices, automate a bunch of this, get releases every day, which makes it less painful, all of these things. So we improve the job of operations a lot. That being said, there are so many, like, if you look (I had it somewhere in my slides.), if you look at statistics from StackOverflow, they did a survey on deployment practices. And the last time they did it was 2017, and they stopped doing it, unfortunately. But I think in 2017; it was something like 20% of all companies deploy through uploading zip files. [laughter] I'm like, where are we? You don't have a single pipeline? You don't...what? Okay. [laughter] ANA: Like we bring back FTPs and just dragging and dropping like no sense of version- control apart from just dropping your code in some FileZilla. [laughs]SASHA: I've literally walked into organizations where they actually didn't have source control. So they're writing software, and they actually don't have source control, and this was like two years ago. To some extent, it makes me mad when people are like, "Oh, DevOps is such a solved problem." or like, "Everybody's doing CI/CD and deploying everything." [chuckles] I'm like, no, th…
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