Brady Catherman

I started life as a bio-informatics cluster administrator, but quickly shifted into Site Reliability Engineering when I started working on GMail at Google in 2006. I was able to work with the early SRE teams at Google, learning how to think about problems with exceptionally large scale. This is where I met Phil Pennock.

After Google I was able to join Twitter very early as an Operations Engineer. That experience was completely out of this world, giving me one of those startup stories that is sometimes outright unbelievable. From the Load Bearing Mac-Mini, to the 48 days spent living on a data center floor trying to get the new cluster working before the clock ran out on our managed hosting environment. At Twitter I implemented the Incident Management process, built out data center operations program, and helped to eliminate the “Fail Whale.”

While at Twitter I also initiated a project called “app-app” which was supposed to be the “application app” which managed deployments to machines. It used cgroups and namespaces and unionfs to create private spaces for applications to run that were free of the base operating system. This conceptually was docker two years before docker and I still kick myself for not working harder to get this open sourced earlier. This lead to my next experience writing a Kubernetes like container management engine at Apcera as founding employee #3, again before Kubernetes existed. It was at Apcera that I met Jonathan Klobuchar for the first time.

At this point I switched over to working as a full time remote SRE for the rest of my career. I started in this new model working for a DBaaS company called Orchestrate (acquired by CenturyLink), and a mobile app streaming service called Mobcrush (acquired by Super League). In both roles I was the only infrastructure engineer when the companies had less than twenty people.

My next gig was an opportunity to work with Jonathan Klobucar again, whom I had initially met at Apcera. This job involved building a SRE team from the ground up including: hiring great people, building infrastructure as code, achieving SOC2 compliance, implementing incident managment, etc. I also worked on the Architectural Support Group, helping engineers think through designs to make sure that they see a problem from every angle, including those not typically thought of by a developer.

I then ventured off to help solve a problem that had plagued many companies I had worked with to that point at a startup called Cookie.ai (later renamed Veza). I have recently moved on to a new adventure will should prove to be just as challenging and rewarding!