Nathan Handler is a Staff Infrastructure Security Engineer at Reddit, where he works within the SPACE (Security, Privacy, Assurance, Corporate Engineering) organization to ensure that Reddit’s rapidly evolving infrastructure is launched and operated securely. His work focuses on building tooling and visibility that make secure-by-default decisions easy for teams across the company. He helps surface misconfigurations early, automate common security controls, and enable developers to understand their security posture without slowing down innovation.

Nathan has been active in the open source community for nearly two decades, including roles as an Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux Developer and as a member of the freenode IRC staff. Prior to joining Reddit, he worked as a Developer Advocate and Software Engineer at Orchid Labs, building an open marketplace for bandwidth on Ethereum, and as a Site Reliability Engineer at Yelp.

Presentations

23x

Building a Unified Cloud Inventory for Reliability: Lessons from Using CloudQuery

Modern SRE work depends on knowing what resources exist across clouds and services, how they are configured, and how they change, but that data is often scattered across tools and systems. This talk shares how we built a unified, continuously updated cloud inventory using CloudQuery to normalize cloud and SaaS data into relational tables. We will explain how we integrated the framework into our infrastructure, extended it with custom plugins, and applied the resulting visibility to incident response, investigations, capacity reviews, and broader reliability practices. Attendees will learn practical approaches for building an internal asset inventory, scaling it in production, and using shared data to improve reliability and collaboration across SRE, Product, and GRC teams.

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20x

How to approach a 10’ Bear in a 3’ Box

This talk will discuss the evolution of SRE as part of a collaborative engineering culture. As companies grow and mature, so must their SRE organizations. Growth is not linear; there is no single correct style, and each approach has trade-offs. This talk explores common evolutions of SRE teams, including:

* The first SRE hire (From 1-4 SREs)

* Small group engagements (Moving from 1 to multiple small groups)

* Evolution of SRE as an organization. (Finding your people, establishing practices)

Oh - also the story of how a 10’, 100 lb Teddy Bear helps make SRE more approachable.

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16x

Snap Your App

In Linux, getting an application packaged and uploaded to the repositories for distribution can be just as challenging if not more than the actual development of the application in the first place. In this talk, Nathan Handler will demonstrate how you can use Snapcraft to quickly turn your applications into Snaps that can then be immediately uploaded to the store. 

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16x

Terraforming all the things

Hashicorp's Terraform allows for the management of infrastructure as code. In this talk, Nathan Handler will discuss how Yelp utilizes Terraform to create and manage AWS ec2 resources, DNS, CDN, and SignalFx charts and dashboards (using their recently open sourced SignalForm).

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15x

Automatically Scaling Mesos Services and Clusters at Yelp

Yelp is running thousands of containers in production. Learn how PaaSTA, an open-source PaaS built on top of Docker, Mesos, Marathon, and Chronos, is being used to automatically and gracefully scale these services and the underlying cluster, saving money during non-peak times while also scaling up as needed to deal with increases in demand.

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