Slight Reliability

Send us Fan Mail In this episode Bruce Cullen interviews Stephen Townshend about the past, present, and future of the Slight Reliability podcast. They discuss their shared backgrounds in software testing, the different career paths that testing has opened up, and much more! Bruce is the Director of Engineering at SquaredUp. You can find him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruce-cullen/ Yo...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode Ivan Merrill from Fiberplane shares his experiences implementing observability within some of the large complex organisations he's worked for in the past. You can find Ivan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-merrill-1a05223/ You can find out more about Fiberplane here: https://fiberplane.com/ You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast webs...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I discuss the word "insight" within the context of observability. Is insight something tools can provide? Is it something you can reproduce?  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_...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode Stephen Townshend discusses our increased dependency on third party cloud services and what this means for reliability with Jeff Martens and Ryan Duffield from https://metrist.io/. You can find Jeff...  On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmartens/ On Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jmartens You can find Ryan... On StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/2...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I propose the use of scatterplots of raw data to better understand how our systems are behaviour and what our customers are experiencing. The ideas from this episode come from my time as a performance engineer and working with legends in that space Richard Leeke (https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-leeke-450448/) and Neil Davies (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neildav...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we discuss uplifting telemetry knowledge within engineering teams to enrich their work (and their lives) with Paige Cruz from Chronosphere. We cover why not to take a chainsaw to your observability in order to cut costs, the dark side of auto-instrumentation, story telling with live data, and much more. The book that Paige recommends at the end is "Effecting M...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we discuss cognitive overload in SRE with Paige Cruz from Chronosphere. We cover both what cognitive load is, what causes it, as well as some potential antidotes and preventative measures. You can check out Chronosphere here: https://chronosphere.io/ You can find Paige on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paigerduty/ You can find the official Slight Reliability...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I discuss my "bigger picture" perspective of what observability needs to be, and why it's important we include business and customer into what we monitor in the Digital Era. The books I highlight in this episode are... Observability Engineering https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/observability-engineering/9781492076438/ Sooner, Safer, Happier: https...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we speak to José  Velez from Rely about reliability at scale, a top down approach to SLOs, the potential and limitations of AI and ML in operations, the question of service ownership, utilising the business criticality of services in how we monitor the underlying infrastructure, and much more. You can check out Rely at https://www.rely.io/ You can find José on Link...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we speak to Ken Hamric about distributed tracing, leveraging tracing for better testing, and observability driven development. The tool that Henrik Rexed integrated with Tracetest was Kuberhealthy (https://www.cncf.io/projects/kuberhealthy/) and you can watch a video of him discussing it in combination with Tracetest here: https://youtu.be/PKQQEeeMYxg?t=2492 Ken al...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode Stephen explores the pros and cons of centralising observability data. Is it a practical to stand up a complex and costly data storage and retrieval solution? Is there another way? 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:...

Send us Fan Mail This week I am joined by Ana Margarita Medina and Adriana Villela, the hosts of the On-Call Me Maybe podcast, to discuss what we'd like to see for SRE in 2023. We talk about observability, SRE recruitment, what organisations need in place to set SRE up for success, and much more. You can find the On-Call Me Maybe podcast on most podcast platforms or go directly to the website...

Send us Fan Mail To begin 2023 I share the books I read last year in my quest to be a better SRE. Here is a list of all the books mentioned during the episode: The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592 Site Reliability Engineering (by Google) https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/ Sooner, Sa...

Send us Fan Mail This week Henrik Rexed and Stephen Townshend discuss their New Year's resolutions for observability. They cover OpenTelemetry and a unified query language, continuous profiling, raw data analysis, instrumenting code, using distributed tracing as part of testing, and much more. Some of the tools or resources mentioned during the episode include: https://tracetest.io/ (distribu...

Send us Fan Mail This week we talk to Steve Gill and Gwen Berry from IAG to discuss their experiences forming an SRE incubator team (starting SRE from scratch in a large enterprise). We discuss on-call, SLOs, single pane of glass, pivoting, chaos engineering, and much more. You can find Steve on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevegill239/ You can find Gwen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin...

Send us Fan Mail This week I share the observations I made at AWS re:Invent relating to SRE work including the lack of SREs at the event, data warehouses for observability data, the use of topologies to understand complexity, FinOps, serverless, making sense of enormous amounts of data... and more. You can find me on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ Twitter: https://twitter...

Send us Fan Mail This week I was at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, so I took the opportunity to walk around the expo asking observability vendors what their perspective or definition of "observability" was (and reflected on that). You can find me on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I explore the different kinds of SRE out there and the different needs they fill in the industry, and discuss some ethically dubious practices around hiring SREs. You can find me on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!). Intro: https://uppbeat.io/t/sensho/good-times...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I chat to Kyle Forster and Shea Stewart from RunWhen about the concept of "social reliability engineering" and how it could help SREs from organisations all over the world create an ecosystem of sharing and collaboration. You can find Kyle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyforster/ You can find Shea on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheast...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I reflect back on the very first episode of Slight Reliability "What the heck is SRE anyway?" and see if my perspective has changed since then. I also tackle the confusion about what SRE is and is not. Shout out to Sebastian Vietz (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastianvietz/) for his "Service Reliability Engineering" terminology and Richard Benw...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I announce my new role as Developer Advocate (SRE) at SquaredUp, and what this means for the Slight Reliability podcast. You can find me on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!). Intro: https://uppbeat.io/t/sensho/good-times License code: QBXDSEGNJZY9DDIC Outro: htt...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I give a summary of the book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manual Pais (https://teamtopologies.com/book) and how this relates to implementing SRE practices. (POINT OF CORRECTION: One of the authors is "Matthew" Skelton, not "Michael") You can find me on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ Twitter: https://twitter.co...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I give my take on the Accelerate State of DevOps 2022 from the SRE perspective. You can find the Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2022 here: https://cloud.google.com/devops/state-of-devops/ You can find me on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!). Intro: https://up...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I share my experience relapsing into anxiety and insomnia, ruminate on an SRE's sphere of influence, and tease an upcoming change of role. You can find me on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!). Intro: https://uppbeat.io/t/sensho/good-times License code: QBXD...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I reflect on the book "The Toyota Way" by Jeffrey Liker, and explore four principles which resonate with my work. The book in question is The Toyota Way: https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Way-Second-Management-Manufacturer/dp/1260468518 You can find me on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre Music...