AI and Modern Workflow Automation: Automating Runbooks

Kyle will talk about the journey of turning a design inspired by Google's runbook automation system into an enterprise product, and how a weekend with LLMs caused them to re-imagine the design from the ground up. Using examples from their own operations, he will show where AI is working today to automate semi-repetitive tasks like responding to alerts, building dynamic runbooks or researching failed tests along with a review of experiments the team tried along the way that did not work out. He will end with a short recruiting pitch to join their unique open source community... spoiler alert: contributors receive royalties when RunWhen's customers import and run their workflow steps.

Kyle Forster has spent his career on the leading edge of cloud infrastructure. He is currently the founder of RunWhen, a company pioneering the use of AI to automate workflows across Platform Engineering, DevOps and SRE. Kyle was previously the Sr Director for Kubernetes Advances Services at Google Cloud. He spent his earlier career in networking as the founder of Big Switch Networks (acquired by Arista) after starting his career at Cisco. Kyle holds an MS and MBA from Stanford University, an BSC in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, and is the author of seven patents in Software Defined Networking, Wireless LAN and Cellular Networks.