Mission-Critical at Nation-State Scale
When Oracle recruited me to lead Network Reliability Engineering for OCI Gen1 & Gen2, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. Our infrastructure powered:
- White House communication systems
- US Marine Corps operational networks
- Every major bank’s critical systems
- 78% of Oracle’s SaaS customers
- Sovereign state infrastructure
One minute of downtime didn’t just mean lost revenue—it could impact national security or global financial markets.
The Challenge
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was experiencing growing pains:
- 300% year-over-year growth straining systems
- Network outages affecting high-profile government clients
- 42 of 62 cloud platforms requiring reliability improvements
- Manual processes that couldn’t scale with growth
- No unified observability across the infrastructure
The mandate was clear: transform reliability without compromising growth.
Leading 12 Engineers to Manage 116,000 Devices
The Team Philosophy
Most companies would have thrown hundreds of engineers at this problem. We took a different approach:
- Quality over Quantity: 12 exceptional SREs instead of 100 average ones
- Automation First: Every engineer owned ~10,000 devices through automation
- Zero Heroes: Systems that run themselves, not people who never sleep
- Continuous Improvement: Every incident became a permanent fix
The Transformation
Year 1: Building the Foundation
- Implemented Prometheus-based observability handling 10+ billion metrics daily
- Created Python automation frameworks eliminating 70% of manual tasks
- Established SRE practices across 42 cloud platforms
- Result: 32% reduction in outage minutes
Year 2: Achieving Excellence
- Rolled out predictive failure detection using time-series analysis
- Implemented automated remediation for 80% of known issues
- Created self-healing network architectures
- Final result: 58% total reduction in outages
Technical Innovation
Open Source at Hyperscale
We proved that open source could handle nation-state infrastructure:
- Prometheus: 10+ billion data points daily across 64 datacenters
- Grafana: Real-time visibility for 116,000 devices
- Python: Custom automation framework managing entire fleet
- Alertmanager: Intelligent routing preventing alert fatigue
Predictive Reliability
Built systems that fixed problems before they happened:
- Time-series analysis predicting failures 4 hours in advance
- Automated capacity planning preventing resource exhaustion
- Self-healing networks that routed around problems
- Proactive replacement of degrading hardware
Cultural Transformation
Changed how Oracle approached reliability:
- Blameless postmortems that actually fixed root causes
- Error budgets that balanced innovation with stability
- On-call rotations that didn’t burn out engineers
- Documentation that actually got used
The Results
For Oracle
- 58% reduction in network-related outages
- 25% reduction in total SaaS customer outage minutes
- 4x faster mean time to recovery (MTTR)
- Zero security compromises during transformation
For Our Customers
- White House communications maintained 100% uptime
- Marine Corps operations never impacted by network issues
- Financial services processed billions without network failures
- Government classified systems maintained required availability
For the Industry
- Proved 12 engineers could outperform 100 with the right approach
- Set new benchmarks for lean infrastructure teams
- Influenced Oracle’s entire approach to reliability engineering
- Demonstrated open source viability for critical infrastructure
Lessons in Leadership
Small Teams, Big Impact
With 12 engineers managing 116,000 devices, we proved that small, focused teams with the right tools can achieve what traditionally required armies of people.
Trust Through Transparency
Regular stakeholder updates showing real metrics built trust:
- Weekly executive dashboards showing improvement trends
- Monthly customer reports demonstrating reliability gains
- Quarterly reviews with government stakeholders
- Real-time status pages for all customers
Innovation Under Pressure
Supporting the White House and Marine Corps meant we couldn’t experiment in production. We built:
- Complete staging environments mirroring production
- Automated testing for every change
- Gradual rollout procedures with automatic rollback
- Chaos engineering practices in controlled environments
From Oracle to AI
The principles that achieved 58% outage reduction at Oracle now guide my AI work:
- Observability is Everything: Can’t improve what you can’t measure
- Small Teams, Right Tools: 12 people can outperform 100 with automation
- Reliability Through Simplicity: Complex systems fail in complex ways
- Continuous Improvement: Every incident is a learning opportunity
The Bottom Line
Reducing outages by 58% while supporting the White House, Marine Corps, and global financial systems proved that with the right approach, small teams can deliver nation-state reliability. The observability patterns, automation frameworks, and SRE practices we developed continue to influence how I build AI systems today.
When your mistakes can impact national security, you learn to build systems that don’t fail. That’s the standard I bring to every AI system I build.