A series of tech talks on building reliable software applications
Whether you're an SRE, a devops engineer, or just working on an application where reliability matters, join us for a series of talks to see how others are tackling problems.
Upcoming topics include incident management, measuring and communicating about reliability (including SLIs and SLOs), testing in production, automation, building a culture of reliability, and eliminating toil throughout your organizations.
Luis Mineiro
Zalando
September 17, 2020 - 3pm CEST | 9am EDT
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.
Software applications are an increasingly important part of business, our economy, and society in general.
At the same time, the complexity that stems from microservices, multi-cloud, and third-party services has left these systems all too prone to failure.
Alex Hidalgo
Site Reliability Engineer
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.
On-Call Me Maybe
The authors of Distributed Tracing in Practice (O'Reilly, 2020) come together for a chat on distributed tracing and their experiences writing the book.