SRE Weekly Issue #101

It’s Sysadvent season again! This article is a great introduction to the idea that there is never just one root cause in an incident.

Want to try out chaos engineering? Here are four kinds of terrible things you can do to your infrastructure, from the folks at Gremlin.

To be clear, this is about using Consul as part of load balancing another service, not load-balancing Consul itself. Several methods are discussed, along with the pros and cons of each.

This article has some interesting ideas, including automated root cause discovery or at least computer-assisted analysis. It also contains this week’s second(!) Challenger shuttle accident reference.

As job titles change, this author argues that the same basic operations skills are still applicable.

Here’s Catchpoint’s yearly round-up of how various sites fared over the recent US holiday period.

These terms mean similar things, and sometimes some of them are used interchangeably. Baron Schwartz sets the record straight, defining each term and explaining the distinctions between them.

If you have a moment, please consider filling out this survey by John Allspaw:

[…] I’m looking to understand what engineers in software-reliant companies need in learning better from post-incident reviews.

In a continuation of last week’s article, Google’s CRE team discusses sharing a postmortem with customers. “Sharing” here means not only giving it to them, but actually working on the postmortem process together with customers, including assigning them followup actions(!).

SRE Amy Tobey approached a new SRE gig with a beginner’s mind and took notes. The result is a useful set of lessons learned and observations that may come in useful next time you change jobs.