1. Lights Out Engineering: Teach Machines to Fix Machines

2. About The Speaker Matthew Moran
Director of Engineering Supply Chain GRE (Guest Reliability Engineering)
Number of years at Target?
Second time working at Target ~11 years
Number of years in GRE at Target?
Was there from the beginning in 2015
What do I do everyday?
Everyday seems to be different but there is definitely a pattern. Ensure rapid mobilization and recovery of production environment for Distribution, Merchandising, and Transportation applications
Favorite thing about GRE?
Having been involved with a major shift in how we do work at Target. We re-skilled and changed what we did and this evolution continues

3. So I’m About to Talk About Teaching Machines to Fix Machines…..
I have seen this before in a movie and I don’t want to be responsible for the lives of Sarah and John Connor, a nuclear war, the end of the human race or two brilliant James Cameroon films and a bunch of direct to DVD movie releases
There is no Skynet
No time traveling hunk of metal
No Hollywood explosions
But we do have….
Failing servers
Out of space databases
Unavailable applications
Occasionally unproductive and unhappy end users

4. The Problem We have nothing to fear but technology instability itself?
Guests and team members annually affected by technology issues:
-1.2 million contacts to our call center
-800,000 incidents
Machines are generating proactive incidents which would eventually become incidents:
-1.6 million annually
Continuous escalating need for human interaction and increasing costs

5. The Evolution
Pre GRE (before 2015)-Heavy human involvement in recoveries
-Up to 400 contractors doing recoveries
-Slower times to restore
-Limited usage of scripts
GRE at the beginning ( )
-Aggregation of current scripts
-Creation of single run scripts
-Recoveries run based on outage already occurring
GRE currently ( )
-Usage of orchestration software for recovery
-Recoveries generated based on trigger
GRE the future (2018 and beyond)
-Lights out engineering

6. What is Lights Out Engineering? Why is it important?
Ensuring that Target technology meets the needs of the guest and team members
Reliability improvement through predictions that drive stability and “always on” business functionality (risk based approach)
Injecting self-healing code/capabilities inside of apps, platforms, services, and core infrastructure
Build self-service features via bots, voice, and augmented reality to increase the productivity of our team members and great experiences for our Guests
Less surprise disruptions for end users
Faster mobilization of recoveries
Less human interaction needed in recoveries
Recoveries built into apps and infrastructure
Happier guests and end users with their technologies

7. The Vision of the Future
All future software/infrastructure built by engineers is self healing- with automation put in the source code based on prior operational learnings
-Data discrepancies
-Database space issues
-File server space issues
-Message queue issues
-Batch job failures
-Application service failures
All legacy software which generate proactive incidents solved with a human will be completed by GREASE
-Infrastructure hardware failures
Team members have self help to recover common incidents
-Videos on how to troubleshoot common register issues
-Initial troubleshooting of end user tools such as handhelds
Prediction of future failure of hardware and replace prior to failure
-Replacement of switches
-Replacement of printer components -
Self Healing
Automated
Self Help
Predictive

8. Questions and answers
Thank you