Slight Reliability

Send us Fan Mail Why do some of the most mature organisations in the world still experience major incidents due to expired or incorrectly applied certificates? This week I'm joined by SRE and DevOps expert Charlie Al-Batty to discuss this and many other things including... ☁︎ His open source project for native SLOs and SLIs in Azure 🔧Building tools and automation to solve problems 🫩 Dealing...

Send us Fan Mail Can you combine your career with personal adventure? What would it be like to live in a truck and travel the country while working remotely? This week I'm joined again by SRE & DevOps legend Amin Astaneh in one of the most human interviews I've ever done. We explore... 💉 The impact of the post-Covid layoffs 🛻 The logistics of living in a mobile home 💥 Staring a co...

Send us Fan Mail When you first start implementing SRE it's a good idea to find early wins. Implementing monitoring of the four golden signals + availability is something I'm experimenting with at the moment to give our SRE team momentum and to pave the way for SLOs and more advanced observability. In this solo episode I share my experiences, including... 💛 What are the four golden sign...

Send us Fan Mail As an engineer you get constant dopamine hits by solving technical problems. As a leader you're often working toward long term goals that span months or years. How do you stay motivated in that context? This week I'm joined by technology leader and fellow Aucklander Cads Oakley. We cover... 🐆 Don't chase the result, harvest the learning 🏆 The payoff for being a le...

Send us Fan Mail This week I repurpose a talk I just did at the JuniorDev meetup in Auckland. If you're new to SRE or observability then this is the talk for you. For the more seasoned listeners, it's a chance to see how my perspective and understanding has changed over the years. In the episode I refer to the This Is Fine! podcast on resilience engineering:  https://www.thisisfinepod.co...

Send us Fan Mail How do you ingest and store petabytes of telemetry every day in a cost effective and high performing way? How can you do this in a way which gives engineers the operational data they need to keep services running? How has this challenge be tackled in the past and what's been the evolution? This week I'm joined by Observe co-founder Jacob Leverich to go deep into this top...

Send us Fan Mail How do you take all the utopian ideas you read about in books and apply them to the reality of the organisations we work in? This week I'm joined by leader, mentor, and coach Rob Roe to tackle this question. We discuss... 🌪️ The pitfalls of functional silos 🤫 Is the annual budget a load of rubbish? 🍃 How our management promotion systems are often broken 🫂 The power of virt...

Send us Fan Mail We spend a third of our life at work. It needs to be something we enjoy and something with purpose. Our work experience also impacts our family, friends, and our personal lives. This week I'm joined by tech engineer, leader, and author Richard Bown to explore this and many other topics including... 🌪️ The difficulty in applying the ideas we read in books in real organisations...

Send us Fan Mail When you become a people leader there is no manual. How can we not only learn leadership skills but practice them and build leadership muscle? This week I'm joined by Orion Group Limited co-founder Xiao Zhang to discuss... 👑 The challenge of transitioning into people leadership 💪 How we don't get fit by watching other people work out ⌚ Pausing as an act of active lead...

Send us Fan Mail This week I kick off the 2026 season with some news and we explore how to prepare for a new role. You can buy Slight Reliability merch here (Note: you cannot order the mugs outside of New Zealand): https://slightreliability.digitees.co.nz/ You can find Stephen on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.socia...

Send us Fan Mail From the day we invented computers we've been struggling to keep applications running and delivering services to the business. Is this latest wave of AI helping or hurting us? This week I'm joined by Causely founder Shmuel Kliger to dive into... 🌊 The three waves of AI hype over the decades (the history of AI) ☠️ The dangers of over-promising and under-delivering what A...

Send us Fan Mail What is operational intelligence and how is it different from observability or BI? This week I'm joined by SquaredUp's VP of Innovation Adam Kinniburgh to answer that question and many more including... ❓ What is operational intelligence? 🙈 Relating observability back to customer, business, or revenue 😎 The value of giving stakeholders confidence 🌉 Who bridges the ga...

Send us Fan Mail How does leading platform teams differ from leading product teams? This week I'm joined by experienced technology leader Dinesh Sukhija to answer that question and many more including... ❓ What is a platform team? ⚽ Coaching engineers to focus on outcomes ☀️ Connecting platform initiatives to business goals ✋ Identifying the limiters in your team 🎤 Spreading knowledge and...

Send us Fan Mail How has my first two years as a manager in tech been? What have I learned? What do I need to work on? This week I share my experiences over the past couple of years. I cover: 🔥 My recent close call with burnout 🫶 How I attempted to build a team culture 💪 The importance of tough conversations 🥱 How roles and responsibilities might be boring to think about but is critical ❓ Wha...

Send us Fan Mail How could AI help human beings negotiate the mountains of telemetry we collect to get simple and fast insight? This week I'm joined by Ottermon AI CEO and founder Checo Pacheco about the lifecycle of observability coverage and tooling within organisations and how AI is helping to find signals amongst the noise and reduce cognitive load for SREs. We discuss... 🎂 The need for...

Send us Fan Mail What is chaos engineering and how is it being used in 2025? This week I'm joined by Gremlin CEO and founder Kolton Andrus to discuss... 🌪️ What is chaos engineering and what is its origins? 🪴 How has it evolved over the year? 🤖 The role of AI agents in SRE work 💰 Justifying the value of chaos engineering 🏃‍♀️‍➡️ How do I get started? ...and much more. You can find Kolton...

Send us Fan Mail What are Team Topologies? How can they be used to deliver value simpler and more effectively (and in a more humane way)? This week I'm joined by Luke McManus to discuss... ⛰️ What are the four team topologies? 🏆 Can we have too much collaboration? ⌚ Team interaction models 🌏 Cognitive load 🏃‍♀️‍➡️ Value dynamics mapping ...and much more. You can find Luke on: LinkedIn: ht...

Send us Fan Mail How do you begin contributing to an open source project? What's it like? What do you get out of it? This week I'm joined by Wendy Ha who shares her unique story of joining the Kubernetes project and becoming a contributor. We explore... ⛰️ What it's like working on one of the biggest open source projects in the world 🏆 The benefits of contributing to open source ⌚...

Send us Fan Mail As an #SRE how do you influence senior leadership to get support and priority for the things you care about? To answer this question I'm joined by Nora Jones, founder of Jeli and now Head of Pricing, Product Strategy and Growth at PagerDuty. Our conversation touches on... 🤝 How understanding needs to flow both ways (between engineers and leaders) 🎨 Reliability is as much an...

Send us Fan Mail This week I do a retrospective on the Slight Reliability podcast. 👂 How many people listen to it? ❤️ How do I feel about the show? 🎉 What's going well? 🪴 What could be better? ❔ What's next for the show? If you want to check out the podcast that came before Slight Reliability, you can find Performance Time archived on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@performanc...

Send us Fan Mail Have you burned out at work? What was your experience? How did you work through it? This week I'm joined by the incredible Colette Alexander to discuss what burnout is, what it means, and we both share our personal experiences burning out at work. We cover... 🔥 What is burnout? ❓ Why does it happen? 🫀 What are the symptoms? 🥊 Fight, flight, or freeze 🧑‍🚒 Advice on how t...

Send us Fan Mail This week I'm joined by the wonderful Hanson Ho to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities in making our mobile apps observable! We cover... 📱 The mobile/backend observability divide ✍️ The challenge of distributed tracing on mobile apps 🌏 The entire device runtime environment matters for your app 👤 The quest for user-centric mobile observability ✅ Advice on how t...

Send us Fan Mail This week on the I'm joined once more by SRE leader Michelle Casey who gives a broad and shallow introduction to resilience engineering. We cover... 🏋️‍♀️ Reliability VS Robustness VS Resilience 🧩 What is a complex system? 🔢 Safety one/safety two 🧠 Mental models 😩 Human error ...and so much more. Resources from this episode: Four concepts for resilience (paper) by Dr. Dav...

Send us Fan Mail This week on the 100th episode I'm joined by DevOps and Resilience Engineering legend John Allspaw to talk about learning (especially from incidents). We discuss... 📒 Classroom VS situated learning 🤝 The myth of the perfect handover ITIL as a coping strategy to try and make sense of the organic, wild, and messy 🥕 How you cannot incentivise to avoid incidents (it doesn&apos...

Send us Fan Mail This week I'm joined by SRE leader Trent Hornibrook who shares a story about how he improved on-call early in his career, and then we explore the broader theme of focusing on the things that matter in observability, incident response, on-call, and beyond. We discuss... 🔌 Empowering engineers to implement change in your org 🧑‍🍼 Focusing on what matters (customer & busin...