Slight Reliability

Send us Fan Mail This week I'm joined by SRE leader Andrew Hatch from Cisco ThousandEyes to talk about a dirty word in the resilience community... root cause. In this excellent conversation we explore... 🌌 Is the root cause of every incident the big bang? 🦖 How the value of root cause degrades as complexity increases 🫣 That if the culture is not blameless, people will hide things 🌳 Altern...

Send us Fan Mail This week I'm joined by David Dick from 2 Steps to (finally!) discuss synthetic monitoring. We cover... 🤖 What is synthetic monitoring? 🦾 What are the benefits and drawbacks to using it? ☢️ Non-web based synthetics (the tough stuff) 🍹 Combining RUM and synthetics 🫢 Does synthetics need an OTEL-like framework? ...and much more. You can find David on: LinkedIn: https://www....

Send us Fan Mail This week I'm joined by Cin7 Engineering Director Milan Brown to unpack the challenges of technology management and leadership. We discuss... ✖️ Theory X vs Theory Y management 🗣️ Intention based leadership and communication 🏢 Conditions in an org for people to thrive 😵‍💫 How do you learn to manage and lead? 🫤 Managing people when you're not an expert in what they do...

Send us Fan Mail This week Leon Adato and I break down the state of applying for roles in tech. We cover... 📝 What a resume or CV is and is not 🤝 Leveraging your connections rather than relying on applying cold 🪄 How most job descriptions are works of fiction 🦾 White-fonting to game AI resume assessment 🧪 Experimental ways we could recruit ...and our pitch for Kubernetes the Rock Opera (and m...

Send us Fan Mail This week Priyam Kumar shares his story of moving from a massive organisation to a startup and the challenges and growth that came from that. We discuss... 🪖 War stories and examples of production incidents 🩹 The "hacks" we build to keep things running (and how maybe that's just normal) 😎 Keeping it simple... YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It!) 🧯 The perils of...

Send us Fan Mail This week Michelle Casey shares her insights as a 'head of' engineering manager in the SRE context. This was one of my favourite conversations on the podcast so far. We cover topics such as... 🤷🏽 Why move into leadership? 👁️ Learning from other leaders 💎 What is unique about SRE leadership? 👑 Women in engineering leadership ...and we go through some feedback I got as...

Send us Fan Mail This week Adam and I get philosophical about what constitutes maturity in the field of observability. We tackle questions such as... 💸 Does your org treat observability as a cost centre or a value add? 🔥 Are you using observability reactively to solve problems? Or proactively to build better products and services? 👤 Is your observability connected to your users and business in...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I explore the challenges of achieving unified observability when integrating with SaaS products and services. I cover: 🌊 The new wave of mega-complex SaaS ⚗️ Challenges integrating SaaS with our observability pipelines 👩‍🦯 How the lack of SaaS autonomy limits the effectiveness of OpenTelemetry 💰 Paying twice to ingest, store, and search telemetry 📈 Monitoring...

Send us Fan Mail This week I check in and give an update on work, life, and my attempts at bringing to life SRE practices in the world of non-production environment management. You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/ You can find Stephen at: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre YouT...

Send us Fan Mail This week I'm joined by Karanveer Anand, SRE Technical Program Manager at Google to discuss blameless post-mortems. We cover: 🦅 The recent Crowdstrike outage and their public post-mortem 🚑 When do we do a blameless post-mortem? 😕 How do we do a blameless post-mortem? ✅ How do we make sure action items are followed through? 📰 The power of learning from post-mortems create...

Send us Fan Mail This week Zach Michel from https://middleware.io/ and I discuss the state of OpenTelemetry and what it means to adopt it. We cover: 🌩️ Achieving observability in a SaaS world 🥫 Context propagation - the magic sauce of OTEL 🚪 The telemetry gateway concept and leveraging the OTEL collector 🪵 The state of OpenTelemetry logging 🫂 Making use of the OpenTelemetry community ...and mu...

Send us Fan Mail In Episode 80 Niall Murphy talked about the need for SREs to be better at articulating the value of our work. In this episode I'm joined by ex-Googler and Engineering Director (SRE) at Culture Amp Artem Yakimenko about how we might achieve this. We discuss both quantifiable and qualitative approaches including leveraging the untapped data in support tickets, customer sentimen...

Send us Fan Mail In the world of SRE we constantly talk about defining SLOs, but what about evolving them over time? This week I chat with SRE Tech Lead Dom Finn about just that. We cover the relationship between reliability and user analytics, latency classes as a way to speak SLOs with business stakeholders, the role of NFRs and how the thresholds differ from SLOs, and much more. Books mentioned...

Send us Fan Mail This week I talk about the impact of SaaS-first technology strategies on the work of an SRE. I pose questions about observability, ownership, on-call, and how much control we have over reliability. You can find the Bleeding Tech blog on Medium: https://medium.com/@stownshend You can find Stephen at: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ Twitter: https://twitter.c...

Send us Fan Mail This week I chat with Dan Slimmon about applying the approach doctors use to treat patient symptoms during incident response. You can find Dan's blog at https://blog.danslimmon.com/ or connect with him on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danslimmon/ You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/ You can find Stephen a...

Send us Fan Mail This week I hear about all things Kubernetes from Komodor CTO and co-founder Itiel Shwartz. We chat about the promise that was made when Kubernetes first entered the industry, the challenge of getting developers engaged and capable of working in Kubernetes, my hate/hate relationship with Helm but its important contribution to the Kubernetes project, Kubernetes observability, and s...

Send us Fan Mail This week I sit down and have a discussion with Amin Astaneh (from Certo Modo) about CI/CD. We cover the power of the standard change as a way to navigate ITIL while still implementing DevOps practices, what to monitor to make your CI/CD observable, single piece flow, testing in production, and so much more. You can find Amin on his company website https://certomodo.io , LinkedIn:...

Send us Fan Mail "Environment issues are just incidents that happened to occur in a non-production environment"... so why do we treat them so differently? In this first episode of the 2024 season I reflect on how we handle incidents in non-prod environments. (Note: Had a few issues with noise suppression in OBS Studio cutting off the start of some words, will sort it for the next episode...

Send us Fan Mail This week I speak with co-author of the original SRE book + the SRE workbook, and renowned speaker Niall Murphy. We chat about the state of SRE in the current macro-economic climate and how we're not yet doing a very good job at articulating the value of SRE to leaders, the relationship that velocity and reliability have, the value of new features versus reliability improveme...

Send us Fan Mail Paige Cruz (from Chronosphere) is back. This week we discuss sampling. What is sampling? Why do it? What kinds of sampling are there? You can check out Chronosphere's cloud native observability platform here: https://chronosphere.io/ You can find Paige on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paigerduty/ X: https://twitter.com/paigerduty You can find the official Slight Reli...

Send us Fan Mail This week Valeska Victoria returns to share some of her experiences working as an SRE at eBay. We look at the cascading effect of production issues in complex integrated environments (how there's often no single root cause), developer literacy of how infrastructure works, the importance of ownership and accountability of reliability, and much more. You can find Valeska on: Li...

Send us Fan Mail This week I chat with Ankit Jain from aviator.co about developer experience. We define developer experience and developer productivity, and how this applies to SRE. We discuss the growing expectation on developers and how this leads to frustration and burnout. We also explore how to measure developer experience and how to start working to make improvements. You can check out Aviat...

Send us Fan Mail A brief mid-week update on my changing circumstances and the future of the podcast.

Send us Fan Mail This week I had the privilege of interviewing Liz Fong-Jones from honeycomb.io about DevRel, Developer Advocacy, and how that applies to SRE. We discuss the difference between Developer Relations (DevRel) and Developer Advocacy, how Liz got into advocacy, how DevRel helps companies and the community, and some tips on how to get traction with SRE practices in your organisation. You...

Send us Fan Mail This week I had the honour of chatting with Steve McGhee (former Google SRE, current Google Reliability Advocate, and co-author of Enterprise Roadmap to SRE). We discuss the evolution of SRE from where it began at Google and how it is being adopted by enterprises around the world now (and why this is happening). We talk about getting leadership support and how we get reliability t...