SREcon26 Americas - Reliability Equilibrium: The Hidden Playbook behind SRE Influence

Description

Reliability Equilibrium: The Hidden Playbook behind SRE Influence Daria Barteneva, Microsoft Azure Reliability and velocity often feel like opposing forces - but what if we treat them as strategic games? This talk reframes sociotechnical trade-offs through a game theory lens, using Nash equilibria, Stag Hunt, Public Goods, and Shapley value to model real-world SRE dynamics. We’ll explore why, without shared decision models, teams default to fragile equilibria like “freeze all changes,” and how mechanism design - error budgets, canary deployments, and progressive rollouts - can shift incentives toward safer, higher-utility outcomes. Grounded in SRE practice and backed by DevOps research, this session equips you to diagnose bad equilibria, design guardrails, and influence system-level behavior - not just symptoms. Learn how to apply cooperative and non-cooperative game theory to reliability engineering and craft strategies that scale across teams, products, and platforms. View the full SREcon26 Americas program at https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/program