Imagine an Oncall shift where you don’t start your day sifting through routine capacity alerts, nudging stuck rollouts, or closing noisy, low-impact tickets. Instead, you get to tackle things that matter. This is the goal we’re chasing at Google.
We are developing a system where software agents can autonomously handle a significant chunk of operational toil. The key is to do this generically and horizontally, making the solutions broadly applicable crossing the lines between developers and operations.
In this session, I’ll share our journey and lessons learned. We’ll cover the significant challenges, including evaluation, ensuring safe and secure operations, and how to codify complex, sometimes opinionated, remediation steps. I’ll outline the infrastructure we’ve put in place due to those challenges and requirements.
This talk aims to provide a practical perspective on leveraging automation and agents in a production environment. You’ll leave with critical questions to consider for your own agent that interacts with production.
Chiara Dellantonio is a Munich-based Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Google. Over her seven-year career, she has served as a Tech Lead across various teams supporting internal products and the authentication stack and developing production monitoring infrastructure. She currently focuses on applying intelligent automation and AI capabilities to production operations, making system management safer and more efficient. Her passion for collaborative problem-solving extends beyond systems engineering: Chiara is an elite speed jigsaw puzzler, boasting a World Team Championship, a European Championship, and two World Pairs silver medals.
