The TwinSLO Proposal

Comments/Insights/Contributions from * Niall Murphy * Toby Burress * Štěpán Davidovič * Sal Furino (Note that when I say "we" below, I don't specifically intend to speak for these fine people, I'm just using the academic "we". -Niall) Introduction If you don’t already…

Virtual Reflections on Kubecon NA 2023

[Reposted from Medium company blog] Introduction I feel like a little bit of a fraud writing about this, since I only managed to attend KubeCon virtually. But I watched enough of it and read enough about it that it gave me some thoughts. OpenTelemetry (Otel) Those of us who only…

SRE in the Real World

(This is a repost of a document living here, but I am putting it here for backup's sake. Originally a joint effort with Murali Suriar, with input from Matt Brown, Liz Fong-Jones, and many others. The intended audience of this doc is the recently laid-off, or those who…

On OKRs

[A repost for reference, since the original was removed as part of house-cleaning elsewhere] I'm solidly in favour of a planning architecture of some kind for any team-size collection of people greater than about 5. (Hell, arguably above 2, but let’s keep overheads down.) I’ve had…

Reflections on SREcon EMEA 2022

[Note to the reader: chairs have an obvious obligation to remain as neutral as possible, which I take very seriously. If I mention specific speakers or talks below, it is definitely not to the exclusion of others.] Though I’ve been involved with SREcon EMEA many times before, this time…

Waste versus slack in production engineering

“The waste remains, The waste remains and kills” – Missing Dates, William Empson Economics teaches us that one person’s income is another person’s expenditure. But we don’t think like that when we think of waste. Instead, our usual intuition for waste is it's something expended that…

What SRE could be

Today, I believe we cannot successfully answer several key questions about SRE. Let's start with the most important one: how can we understand what reliability customers want and need?…

The Curse of Systems Thinkers (Part 1)

Somewhere between 15 and 20 years ago, I worked for a company. It was a very prestigious company, and it was a glorious and frustrating time. The company did amazing things. Literally unbelievable achievements - from my point of view anyway. But this was coupled with levels of chaos that…