99 Percent Visible: DevOps Reliability

Kat Cosgrove
Developer Advocate, jFrog

Learning to Learn by Teaching

I'm a Developer Advocate. That means that ultimately, my job is to teach people things. Over the last year and some change, I've given dozens of talks and workshops about DevOps, the majority of them educational in nature. The way I approach developer education has changed pretty radically over that period of time – more difficult for me in some ways, but better for my audience in every way. The assumptions I make are different now, and the way I communicate has changed, too.

They say you don't truly understand something until you can teach it to someone else, so in the spirit of that, let me teach you what I've learned in my time teaching developers. Everyone learns differently, but everyone also has something they can teach you.

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Viktor Farcic
@vfarcic

Blog: DevOps Hacks "The DevOps Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints"

Viktor Farcic is a Principal DevOps Architect at Codefresh, a member of the Google Developer Experts and Docker Captains groups, and published author.

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Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct

Achieving Zero Downtime

Users expect new features – but they also expect uninterrupted service. Zero downtime deployments are a way to achieve both of these goals. But what does "zero downtime" mean and how can we deliver it? I'll cover a number of different strategies like red/black (blue/green) deployments, rolling deployments, and canaries and whether these truly provide "zero downtime" deployments. I'll talk about how different kinds of infrastructure can help, including service discovery, proxies, and the kernel itself. Finally, I'll also talk about the role of observability in zero downtime deployments – what to measure, what to alert on, and how to debug them.

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Luis Mineiro
Zalando

Are We All on the Same Page? Let's Fix That.

The industry has defined it as good practice to have as few alerts as possible, by alerting on symptoms that are associated with end-user pain rather than trying to catch every possible way that pain could be caused.

Organizations with complex distributed systems that span dozens of teams can have a hard time following such practice without burning out the teams owning the client-facing services. A typical solution is to have alerts on all the layers of their distributed systems. This approach almost always leads to an excessive number of alerts and results in alert fatigue.

Adaptive Paging is an alert handler that leverages the causality from tracing and OpenTracing's semantic conventions to page the team closest to the problem. From a single alerting rule, a set of heuristics can be applied to identify the most probable root cause, paging the respective team instead of the alert owner.

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Alex Hidalgo
Site Reliability Engineer

I Have an SLO. Now What?

It’s 2020: There is a plethora of data available about measuring SLIs and setting SLO targets. But, now that you have this data, what are you actually supposed to do with it? The classic example of “Ship features when you have error budget; focus on reliability when you don’t.” is antiquated, too simple, and ignores all of the amazing discussions and decisions you can have with your SLO data. Let’s talk about how you can use SLOs to actually make people happier — from your customers, to your engineers, to your business.

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On-Call Me Maybe

Distributed Tracing in Practice: Author Round Table

The authors of Distributed Tracing in Practice (O'Reilly, 2020) come together for a chat on distributed tracing and their experiences writing the book.

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