SREDAY

SREs are on the frontlines of uptime, performance, cost efficiency, and incident response. So, at times, policies for security and compliance often live in stale docs enforced inconsistently, if at all, until something breaks or someone has an audit. Policy as Code (PaC) replaces that mess with real-time automation right where the work happens.

We will discuss how PaC bridges the gap between security and operations by making policies transparent, codified, versioned, and customizable so you can enforce external standards (CIS, SOC 2, HIPAA) and your own internal rules (like requiring HA in prod but not in dev). You'll see how to apply policy intent consistently from the pipeline directly to runtime, giving teams proactive control, not reactive fire drills or unnecessary "vibe killers".

We'll walk through a full-lifecycle live demo to see the possibilities of PaC to: - Prevent misconfigurations with real-time checks - Enforce policies consistently across repos, infra, and runtime - Customize and codify controls that reflect unique needs - Control cloud costs through autoscaling, right-sizing, and cleanup - Unify security, dev, and ops with shared policies

What will we accomplish? Well, no more stale docs or arguments around policies, faster deploy, tighter cost controls, and safer infrastructure without slowing anyone down.

Alayshia Knighten is a seasoned engineering leader and customer success strategist with a strong background in DevOps, cloud architecture, and technical enablement. Currently serving as the Founding Principal Customer Success Engineer at Mondoo, she brings over a decade of experience helping organizations build and scale secure, efficient, and reliable infrastructure.

Previously, Alayshia held key roles at Pulumi as a Senior Customer Architect and at Honeycomb.io, where she led implementation engineering and partnerships architecture. Her expertise spans across engineering consulting at Chef Software and hands-on DevOps engineering at Verisign. Passionate about empowering teams and driving technical excellence, Alayshia is known for bridging the gap between engineering and customer success.

We, tech people, have internalized the concept of reliability so deeply that we don't need an explanation for why it's bad to have services failing in production. It doesn't matter what your software is doing — whether it controls train schedules, allows people to make money transfers, or serves funny pictures online.

We have invented an entire language to talk about reliability. We say things like, "This service runs with three nines availability," "Mean-Time-To-Repair for the website is 25 minutes," or "This month, we consumed 80% of our error budget."

And yet, it's a common struggle to convince business stakeholders to prioritize technical improvements.

In the past seven years, I've been responsible for products and services used by millions of people. I have been on call for years and have spent many nights resolving production incidents. From that experience, I learned how to make reliability a shared priority and prove, with data, the value of technical improvements.

In this session, I'll share techniques you can use to improve the reliability of your services, convince business stakeholders of the importance of reliability, and drive positive change in your organization.

Maxim Schepelin has been an engineering leader in various industries including game dev, e-commerce, and travel building teams capable of launching products from idea to world-scale. With over a decade of experience leading engineering teams, Maxim has mastered the art and science of management, as well as how to exit both Vim and Emacs. Maxim continues exploring ways to build effective engineering teams that deliver value at a sustainable pace.

Constructing and managing platforms for diverse teams and workloads presents a significant challenge in today's cloud-native environment. This session introduces the concept of composable platforms, using modular, reusable components as the foundation for platform engineering. This talk will demonstrate how using Kratix, a workload-centric framework, and Backstage, an extensible developer portal, enables the creation of self-service platforms that balance standardization with adaptability. The session will detail platform design for scalability and governance, streamlining developer workflows through Backstage, and using Kratix Promises for varied workload requirements. Attendees will gain practical insights into building scalable and maintainable platforms through real-world examples, architectural patterns, and a live demonstration of a fully integrated Kratix-Backstage deployment.

Hossein is an experienced cloud computing professional with nearly a decade of expertise in distributed systems and cloud technologies. He began as a working student specializing in cloud automation at the Max Planck Institute, progressing to a full-time role focusing on on-premises cloud infrastructure and Docker. He built an on-premises Kubernetes platform in the industry and later honed his cloud and DevOps expertise as a senior consultant. As a tech lead, Hossein drives impactful projects, mentors platform engineers, and contributes to the community through talks and workshops.

Coming soon...

Birol Yildiz is the Co-founder and CEO of ilert, adeptly steering the company with a rare combination of technical and product expertise. His prior experience includes a significant role as Chief Product Owner for Big Data products at REWE Digital. With a strong foundation in computer science, Birol bridges the gap between developer and product strategist, constantly striving to innovate and provide customer-centric solutions at ilert.