Support Operations Engineering: Scaling Developer Products to the Millions

Wednesday, 2 October, 2019 - 11:3012:00

Junade Ali, Cloudflare

Abstract: 

Large scale internet infrastructure companies are increasingly relied upon by other engineering organisations, from self-serve customers to large enterprise organisations. The duty of helping customers SRE and engineering teams diagnose complex and stressful issues will likely rest with technical support. Support Operations Engineers compliment this by treating support as an optimisation problem with engineering solutions.

This talk describes the essential principles that Cloudflare’s Support Operations Engineers use to scale developer support in a large-scale internet infrastructure company serving 16+ million customer domains and more than 10% of global HTTP requests, whilst driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency and delivering exceptional business value.

This talk will cover how Stateless Testing is used to introduce proactive support and improve customer retention, how Safety Engineering strategies are used with Machine Learning to automate customer support and how Operations Research with alerting data is used to create a next-gen Security Operations Centre.

Junade Ali, Cloudflare

Junade Ali is an Engineering Manager at Cloudflare, focusing on building the Support Operations Group. He has previously worked on high-integrity software for safety critical applications and previously served as Lead Developer of the largest digital agency in the UK (by headcount). He has publications in the fields of combinatorics, software engineering and cryptography. He has an MSc in Computer Science with an award-winning thesis and is extending his work as a part-time PhD student.

Open Access Media

USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted after the event are also free and open to everyone. Support USENIX and our commitment to Open Access.

BibTeX
@conference {239456,
author = {Junade Ali},
title = {Support Operations Engineering: Scaling Developer Products to the Millions},
year = {2019},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}

Presentation Video