This 2-part episode of The VOID Podcast is just awesome, and well worth a listen. The conversation is framed as a retrospective of a simulated incident, with a high level of expertise and experience in the incident participants and the retrospective facilitator. I have a lot to think about, especially the discussion of overload and the four ways people react to it.

  Courtney Nash — The VOID Podcast, with guests Sarah Butt, Eric Dobbs, Alex Elman, and Hamed Silatani

Discover how tail sampling in OpenTelemetry enhances observability, reduces costs, and captures critical traces for faster detection and smarter system monitoring.

   Rishab Jolly — DZone

Datadog has evolved their time series storage through five generations before, and now they’re on the sixth. Click through to find out what motivated each change and what’s different this time around.

  Khayyam Guliyev, Duarte Nunes, Ming Chen, and Justin Jaffray — Datadog

Meta uses a tool to automatically estimate the risk level of a code change. They’ve used this to reduce the use of code freezes.

  Meta

The authors of Catchpoint’s SRE Report look back at their analysis and predictions related to AIOps, compared to how things are unfolding now.

  Leo Vasiliou and Denton Chikura — The New Stack

I love the approach and the level of detail in this article. They gave four LLMs access to observability data in a simulated infrastructure and asked them to troubleshoot a problem. It’s super useful to see the actual results from the LLMs.

  Lionel Palacin and Al Brown — ClickHouse

Uptime Labs goes meta by sharing the details of an incident they experienced last month, involving runaway creation of dynamic queues in RabbitMQ.

  Joe Mckevitt — Uptime Labs

I’m pretty impressed: Cloudflare published this article with a ton of detail on an incident, the day after it happened. A surge of traffic overloaded Cloudflare’s Data Center Internet connect links to AWS’s us-east-1 region.

  David Tuber, Emily Music, Bryton Herdes — Cloudflare

Catchpoint’s yearly survey is live! This time, they’ll plant a tree for each of the first 2000 respondents.

  Catchpoint

If you’re looking to build a status page, this article is for you. It gives reviews of 10 status pages and sums it up with a list of things to consider as you design yours.

  Sara Miteva — Checkly

The GCP outage on June 12 hit Cloudflare hard, and they’ve responded by redesigning their Workers KV service to eliminate the dependency on a third party cloud.

   Alex Robinson and Tyson Trautmann — Cloudflare

I found the bit about Google’s historical reasons for SRE especially interesting.

  Dave O’Connor

There’s a fascinating point in this article explaining why “eventual consistency” may sound entirely different to German speakers. It continues on to a really good explanation of what eventual consistency actually means.

  Uwe Friedrichsen

This article introduces SLI Compass, a 2D mental model to help you:

• Quickly assess the signal/noise ratio of existing SLIs
• Evaluate SLIs based on their cost and complexity
• Set a direction for improving the quality of existing SLIs at a reasonable ROI

  Alex Ewerlöf

This is a really interesting failure mode for an endpoint monitoring provider.

  Tomas Koprusak — UptimeRobot

As we learn advanced resilience engineering concepts, this article recommends that we take a balanced approach in how we try to change existing practices.

I can confidently say that when an executive leader wants to be talking about quality of service for your customers, the last thing they want to hear about is academic papers and Monte Carlo simulations.

  Michelle Casey — Resilience in Software Foundation

I know you probably know all about how hashing works, but this one’s still worth a read. The article includes interactive demonstrations and clearly presents concepts to help you understand how hashing function performance is evaluated.

  Sam Rose

Pulled from the Internet Archive, here’s a story of how the now-defunct Parse rewrote their Ruby on Rails API in Golang, significantly improving reliability.

  Charity Majors

We are sharing methodologies we deploy at various scales for detecting SDC [Silent Data Corruption] across our AI and non-AI infrastructure to help ensure the reliability of AI training and inference workloads across Meta.

  Harish Dattatraya Dixit and Sriram Sankar — Meta

As monday.com broke their monolith up into microservices, their number of databases expanded too. To have a chance of managing all of them, they shifted from DBA practices to DBRE.

  Mateusz Wojciechowski — monday.com

Airbnb runs a large-scale database on Kubernetes. They have various techniques to deal with the ephemerality of pods and the risks inherent in cluster upgrades.

  Artem Danilov — Airbnb

The author of this article brings us along as they do a very thorough evaluation of K8sGPT, showing us what it can do and some ways in which it can fall short.

  Evgeny Torin — Palark

What is good incident communication? This article draws on theory from Herbert Clark’s Joint Action Ladder to help us evaluate and strengthen communication.

  Stuart Rimell — Uptime Labs

A story of the failure of a pumped energy storage facility, involving all of our favorite features like complex contributing factors, work-as-done vs work-as-designed, and early warning signs only obvious in hindsight. As a bonus, no one was killed.

  Practical Engineering

Nebula‘s streaming service has a surprisingly write-heavy workflow owing to storing bookmarks of the latest point a given user has watched in a video. That makes scaling an interesting challenge.

   Sam Rose — Nebula

I love the debugging technique they used: kill processes one at a time until performance improves.

  Samson Hu, Shashank Tavildar, Eric Kalkanger, and Hunter Gatewood — Pinterest

This article is about finding the balance between having enough process to ensure incident response goes smoothly, and having so much process that incident responders are unable to adapt to unexpected situations.

  Brandon Chalk — Rootly

This article presents two case studies of dialog during incidents along with analysis of each. How does your own analysis compare?

  Hamed Silatani — Uptime Labs

They realized that a single alert can’t catch both a sudden AC failure and an AC that becomes slowly but steadily overwhelmed.

  Chris Siebenmann

Thoughts on migrations as a significant source of reliability risk.

[…] engineering organizations at tech companies need to make migrations a part of their core competency, rather than seeing them as one-off chores.

  Lorin Hochstein

An incorrect physical disconnection was made to the active network switch serving our control plane, rather than the redundant unit scheduled for removal.

This reminds me of wrong-side surgery incidents and aircraft pilots shutting off the good engine when one fails.

  Google

Pinterest decided to replace their Hadoop+Spark-based data processing pipeline with one based on Kubernetes.

In part one, we provide rationale for our new technical direction prior to outlining the overall design and detailing the application focused layer of our platform. We conclude with current status and some of our learnings.

  Soam Acharya, Rainie Li., William Tom, and Ang Zhang — Pinterest

This article raises some important concerns that are worth thinking about.

It’s fast and feels efficient, but it masks a drop in codebase familiarity. Over time, your top engineers stop being system experts.

  Alexander Procter — Okoone

I really love the care taken in this article to consider the potential risks of AI tools for incident response. There are many valuable insights that make this article way more than just a sales pitch for their tool.

  Chris Evans — incident.io

Quicksilver a globally distributed key-value store serving billions of requests per second where speed is critical, so you know the scaling challenges are going to be interesting.

  Marten van de Sanden and Anton Dort-Golts — Cloudflare

This article gives reproducible cases in which MySQL and Postgres can reuse auto-increment IDs.

I think I’ve seen this advice violated at nearly every company I’ve worked at:

Best practice dictates that you shouldn’t be using IDs from database tables outside of that table unless it’s some foreign key field

  Sam Rose

Here’s a great explanation of why it’s often better to use for_each instead of count in Terraform.

  Ned Bellavance

This debugging story really drew me in. It’s so incredibly satisfying the way their initial theory was confirmed so tidily in the end.

  Nayef Ghattas — Datadog

In our latest Rootly roundtable, we sat down with a group of seasoned SREs (collectively packing over 100 years of ops scars) to trade notes on what makes an alert useful, what makes it noise, and how to build alerting systems that teams can trust.

Here are their top strategies distilled for you:

  Jorge Lainfiesta — Rootly