Artificial Intelligence

Presenters Suganya Nagarajan Source Conf42 SRE 2026 🚀 Beyond Blind Automation: The Power of Human-Governed AI Loops In the high-stakes world of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), we face a recurring dilemma: as systems scale, manual interventions become a bottleneck, yet blind automation remains a dangerous liability. I am Suganya Nagarajan, an engineering manager with a decade of experience in large-scale distributed systems. Today, I want to share a framework to bridge this gap: Human-Governed Automation Loops (HAL). This approach ensures that our AI systems remain reliable, accountable, and safe, even as they operate at breakneck speeds. ...

Presenters Sonali Galhotra Source Conf42 SRE 2026 🌐 Beyond the Dashboard: Why Reliability is an Organizational System Problem In the world of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), we often obsess over uptime, latency, error budgets, and system telemetry. While these metrics are vital, they don’t tell the whole story. According to Sonali Galhotra, a leader at the intersection of technical program leadership and platform engineering, the most critical reliability signals don’t always appear on a monitoring dashboard. Instead, they emerge from how an organization structures itself and where it chooses to invest. ...

Presenters Shruthi Rajashekar Source Conf42 SRE 2026 Unifying the Hybrid Cloud: How VM Service is Revolutionizing VM and Container Management 🚀 Hey tech enthusiasts! Shruthi Rajashekar, an engineering manager at Broadcom, is here to shed some light on a game-changer for hybrid cloud environments. For the past decade at VMware Broadcom, Shruthi has been instrumental in developing foundational technologies like vMotion and VM service, bridging the gap between traditional virtualization and modern cloud-native infrastructure. Today, she’s diving deep into how a unified control plane for virtual machines (VMs) and container-based workloads can be achieved using VM service, a VCF offering, and why this approach is absolutely critical for platforms demanding high availability and operational excellence. ...

Presenters Daniel Raskin David McNerney Source Conf42 SRE 2026 🕵️‍♂️ When the Stack Lies: Unmasking Root Cause in Distributed Systems In the high-stakes world of modern enterprise technology, the “stack” often tells half-truths. As we migrate from classic three-tiered architectures to hyper-distributed environments, the complexity of our systems is outstripping our ability to monitor them. Daniel Raskin (CMO at Vertana) and David McNerney (Director of Product Management at Vertana) recently sat down to dissect why traditional observability is failing and how a system-aware approach can save the day. ...

Presenters Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia Vanessa Lee Source Product School podcast 🚀 Courage as a Service: How Shopify’s VP of Product Builds the Future of Commerce In the fast-paced world of global commerce, where Shopify powers over $1.1 trillion in sales and stands as the second-largest online retailer in the US, product leadership requires more than just spreadsheets and roadmaps. It requires courage. We sat down with Vanessa Lee, Vice President of Product at Shopify, to discuss how a culture of deep technical involvement, AI-native thinking, and fearless feedback loops drives one of the most successful tech companies in the world. ...