The worst outage I never caused

Fri September 04, 04:35 PM–05:00 PM • Back to program
Start time 16:35
End time 17:00
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In 2017 I came one keypress from causing Google's main backbone to largely fall off the Internet. This is the story of how we used that incident as a learning opportunity, how a lack of buy-in hindered further improvements, and how an existing toolkit of python libraries allowed testing and validation tools to be quickly built, preventing any chance of a recurrence.

In 2017 I came one keypress from causing Google's main backbone to largely fall off the Internet. This is the story of how we used that incident as a learning opportunity, how a lack of buy-in hindered further improvements, and how an existing toolkit of python libraries allowed testing and validation tools to be quickly built, preventing any chance of a recurrence.

Julien Goodwin he/him

Julien is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Google Sydney, from 2011 to 2018 he worked on Google's production networks, focusing on Internet routing & interconnection. When not at work he does things like designing custom embedded Linux machines & modernising frequency distribution systems.

He is also the current Secretary of Linux Australia, the parent organisation for PyCon AU.