Jim Giles, Ph.D., Google Engineering Director, Google Drive, Boulder, Colorado
Abstract - Maintaining high availability for very large scale cloud-based services is incredibly challenging and requires constant diligence. These systems are often continuously undergoing improvements by hundreds or thousands of engineers and sometimes have to be completely rearchitected and rebuilt without missing a beat as aging infrastructure is no longer able to keep up with growth. In this talk, I'll describe some of the challenges, my experiences helping to make Google's cloud-based production systems more reliable and the best practices I've learned along the way (sometimes the hard way). I'll also share a few tips on career paths and what makes engineers most successful at Google.
Biography - Jim Giles is the Engineering Director responsible for Google Drive based at Google's campus in Boulder, Colorado. He received his Ph.D. in ECE from UIUC in 2000. He was previously a researcher and Distinguished Engineer at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center working on networking, security, and stream-processing middleware before joining Google in 2014. At Google, Jim worked on the display, video, and mobile advertising platform for premium publishers as well as the real-time ad auction in New York City before moving to Google Drive in 2019.
