Effective SRE

In theory, having a solid SRE program is required for successful cloud IT services.  In practice, not all SRE programs are created equal, and in fact many attempts to establish an SRE program have failed or even backfired.  What distinguishes a good SRE program from a bad one, and is there a framework for preventing catastrophe?  This isn't an idle discipline.  Many of the practices mentioned in the original SRE materials are now hotly contested, like MTTR, root cause analysis, and runbook automation.

SRE deserves a critical and optimistic review.  For example, are qualitative methods better suited to evaluate the success of SRE over quantitative methods?  As a practice, SRE may be the software industry's best hope of holding off governmental regulations around availability, uptime, and certification of software engineers.  That hope can only be fulfilled if we have effective SRE practices.


From this track

Session SRE

Rethinking Reliability: What You Can (and Can't) Learn From Incidents

Tuesday Dec 6 / 09:00AM PST

This talk presents research collected from the VOID—an open database of public incident reports. Containing over 2,000 reports for almost 700 organizations, the database allows for more structured review and research about software-related incident reporting.

Speaker image - Courtney Nash

Courtney Nash

Internet Incident Librarian & Senior Research Analyst @Verica

Session SRE

Did the Chaos Test Pass?

Tuesday Dec 6 / 10:10AM PST

People used to ask me all the time how to figure out if their chaos test has “passed,” and I’d always say “well, that’s a loaded question.” To confirm that a chaos test “passed,” we need to do verification of hypotheses - sometimes you’re trying to prove some system behavior occurred in response

Speaker image - Christina Yakomin

Christina Yakomin

Senior Site Reliability Engineering Specialist @Vanguard_Group

Session SRE

The Endgame of SRE

Tuesday Dec 6 / 11:20AM PST

The containers are deployed and the builds are green. Yaml flows through the system, linted, reviewed, tested, and shipped with ease and regularity. Our intrepid SRE finds themself at a crossroads. The infrastructure is great but teams still struggle to maintain error budgets.

Speaker image - Amy Tobey

Amy Tobey

Senior Principal Engineer and SRE Practice Leader @Equinix

Session SRE

The Eternal Sunshine of the Toil-Less Prod

Tuesday Dec 6 / 12:30PM PST

One of the most important decisions in building an SRE practice is what kind of work should be assigned to the SRE team, and in what percentages.

Speaker image - Sasha Rosenbaum

Sasha Rosenbaum

Director of the Cloud Services Black Belt Team @RedHat

Date

Tuesday Dec 6 / 09:00AM PST

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Track Host

Casey Rosenthal

CEO, Co-Founder @verica_io

Casey Rosenthal is CEO and cofounder of Verica; formerly the Engineering Manager of the Chaos Engineering Team at Netflix. He has experience with distributed systems, artificial intelligence, translating novel algorithms and academia into working models, and selling a vision of the possible to clients and colleagues alike. His super‐power is transforming misaligned teams into high performance teams, and his personal mission is to help people see that something different, something better, is possible. For fun, he models human behavior using personality profiles in Ruby, Erlang, Elixir, and Prolog.

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