A Bio You Can Copy
Molly Sheets is the Director of Engineering for Kubernetes at Zynga, a part of Take-Two Interactive. Previously she was the Principal Solutions Architect for Games customers at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Before Amazon she was CEO @ Ker-Chunk Games for 6.5 years, a profitable, award-winning mobile developer in Georgia (4 games) and lead designer at Thrust Interactive (12 games). Molly has 15+ years of professional experience in entertainment and brings leadership on more than 30+ released cloud solutions, games, and websites. Her sweet spot is in unifying teams through full life-cycle development and liveops challenges that result from infrastructure growth in organizationally massive game studios and publishers.
She is passionate about supporting and growing talent to find the right solutions for devops architectures, analytics migrations, games streaming, and core compute – and their career leadership skills. Together, her teams influence multi-billion dollar mobile & AAA studios, cross-platform games, and the broader industry.
She greatly enjoys setting up a really long joke. Perhaps over-investing. When she’s not working she’s learning banjo, astrophotography, and hiking and regularly shares about these adventures alongside devops, infrastructure, and cloud computing.
Why “SEV 1 Party?”
Some organizations have stopped living in fear — they stopped adding process on top of approvals to get to production because of compliance. They stopped fearing downtime because downtime is distributed and no longer holistic or revenue impacting depending on the microservice. They moved from the binary of up and down and take time to think about impact in distributed systems. They do the math to save money in people time. They don’t stop the roadmap because of one incident. They breath and ask: What happened and who did it affect? They have embraced the SEV 1 party as an invitation for which they want because they evaluate incidents against their users, their own team health, and operational excellence to build sustainable cultures.
Enlightenment is when teams leave the assumption that change is something we, as developers and those who manage infrastructure, control exclusively.
Growth is when teams realize predictability is the byproduct of operational excellence, and innovation is the byproduct of exceptional team performance in unpredictable conditions they want to have.
SEV 1 Party is a mindset about change in massive scale. That progress is hindered by fearing production, adding environments, or slowly pushing. Growth happens through deployment and cataloging severity of microservices architectures. The bigger an entity becomes, the more distributed and fragmented, the more teams must ask “What is a SEV 1 now?” Today, SEV 1s are often no longer one entire game or one entire product, but instead, on a service level. Teams begin working on SLOs (service level objectives). Those used to be cataloged as SEV 2s or 3s – but if you are reliable and your infrastructure is always up, what’s next? High performing ops teams plan, they practice in production, and they regret nothing.
SEV 1 Party is when a team practices and releases so much in distributed systems, that more often than not environments are stable, and when they are not, they are excited, not fearful, and not yelling at each other. The feeling is “Finally, we have not seen this before.” The better a team becomes, the rarer SEV 1s are and, more often than not, they are associated with real innovation, real risk, and real challenge to grow as friends and colleagues who respect each other excited to wake up and be there.
So Bridge Up, and invite me to your SEV 1 Party because telling the tale is living, not living to tell the tale.