Services are the backbone of our systems. They are the pieces that make up our businesses—whether they are literal microservices or functional components of a traditional application, we can’t do the computer thing without services.

When it comes to a service in your company or organization, who’s responsible for it? The cast of characters involved in the lifecycle of a service are more than just software engineers—they can include program managers, product owners, sustainability/SRE/ops, and business stakeholders, just to name a few.

In this talk, we will follow the story of a service at the fictional FakeCorp, from when it was a tiny idea, to when it makes a billion dollars, and finally, to when we have to retire it for something better.

Topics covered in this talk include:

• Defining what a service means to you and your organization
• Roles in service ownership
• What are you observing about your service?
• How you want a team to respond to a service
• Managing the service in production
• Tuning your service
• Understanding business impact

Matt Stratton is a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, where he helps dev and ops teams advance the practice of their craft and become more operationally mature. He collaborates with PagerDuty customers and