How do we create better dashboards? Yes, the title is an intentional joke about “pane” versus “pain.” I frequently hear leaders say they wish they had a “single pane of glass” (aka SPOG) to visualize all of the possible metrics that could impact a service, an application, or their entire…

The idea of DevSecOps has existed for some time, where engineers are expected to incorporate security concerns at the time of development so it is not a concern layered in after the fact. We called this “shifting left,” and I don’t think we’re shifting left far enough. Security is a…

TL;DR — Software engineers and SREs should share a single on-call rotation as part of a single team, as this is where empathy for each other is built. Organizations adopt SRE in ways that suit them best, and that makes complete sense to me. Not every company is Google or…

A post about the importance of product in SRE, and how to make product and SRE first-class citizens in your Software Development Lifecycle. As Site Reliability Engineers and leaders, it’s easy to get bogged down in the details of what we’re doing — are we releasing fast enough, are we…

I expect that someone has captured this concept into a formal business leadership process, but I’ve yet to run across it. Every executive leader has three things on which they focus to drive the outcomes that they want and that are expected of them by their organization. These are: Mandate…

I’ve had some experiences lately that made me think about what we’re trying to achieve as SRE leaders. In this space, it is very easy to be consumed by the concept of availability — that we are laser-focused on improving the SLIs that define availability for a service, and the…

When I talk to people about Service Level Indicators, there is a fair amount of confusion about the work your teams must do to successfully implement them. In my talks explaining SRE, I’ve mentioned that SLIs are the “what,” representing the availability of your system that you can then track…

In my recent talk, my friend Mike Jones (VP of Engineering at Classmates.com and former Facebook co-worker) was kind enough to join and give his perspectives. Mike had one really great point that I want to elaborate on — SREs require independence from the Software Engineering managerial hierarchy. This may…

Thanks to the team at Meetup Madness for hosting my talk on January 26th, 2021. This was a fun event reflective of our current “virtual” business climate during the pandemic, with a speaker in Seattle for an event in Sydney/Melbourne with attendees from as far away as Saudi Arabia. Talk Deck Talk Video