How Stripe Invests in Technical Infrastructure

Explore the intricacies of prioritizing technical infrastructure investments in this 43-minute conference talk from SREcon19 Europe/Middle East/Africa. Delve into Stripe's approach to balancing short-term firefighting with long-term innovation as companies scale. Learn strategies for justifying and potentially expanding infrastructure spending, adapting between crisis management and innovation phases, and maintaining equilibrium between supporting existing products and enabling new development. Gain insights on reducing concurrent work, automating tasks, fostering creativity and courage in decision-making, and implementing effective benchmarking practices. Examine real-world examples, including Stripe's experiences with MongoDB and Kubernetes, and understand the importance of validating approaches through tools like Railyard. Discover how to structure teams and develop a comprehensive infrastructure investment strategy that drives long-term company success.

Intro
How do you prioritize infrastructure investment
What is technical infrastructure
The continuum
Shortterm vs longterm
Firefighting
Stuck firefighting
MongoDB
No standing still
How to fix it
Reduce concurrent work
Automate tasks
Creativity
Courage
Innovation
Benchmarking
sorbet
place what to do
prioritize
moving to Kubernetes
the wrong solution
validate your approach
Railyard
Fool me once
Load generation team
Infrastructure properties
Forced Long Term Work
Do We Actually Do Now
Investment Strategy
Questions
Team Structure