“The International Space Station has been orbiting the Earth for over 20 years. It was not launched fully formed, as a monolith in space. Instead, it is built out of dozens of individual modules, each with a dedicated role - life support, engineering, science, commercial applications and more. Each module (or container) functions as a microservice, adding additional capabilities to the whole. Not only do the modules need to function together, delivering both functional and non-functional capabilities, they were designed, developed and built by different countries on Earth and once launched into space (deployed in multiple different ways), had to work together - perfectly.

Despite the many (minor) reliability issues which have occurred over the decades, the ISS remains a highly reliable platform for cutting edge scientific and engineering research.

In this session I will describe the way the space station was developed and the lessons Site Reliability and DevOps Engineers can learn from it.

ROBERT WORKS FOR IBM, HELPING CLIENTS IMPROVE THEIR IT OPERATIONS. HE IS AN SRE AND AIOPS EVANGELIST WHO ENJOYS HELPING OTHERS SOLVE PROBLEMS EVEN MORE THAN HE ENJOYS SOLVING THEM HIMSELF. ROBERT HAS