It really should! Even Google is much more accurately described as a “service” than a “site”.

Chris Riley — Splunk

There are migrations, and then there’s the time between migrations.

Will Larson

2020 was the year mainstream folks realized how important reliability is. Will overall reliability improve in 2021?

Robert Ross — FireHydrant

I love this for the click-bait title and the content. An HAProxy feature designed for HA had a surprising an unexpected behavior.

Andre Newman — GitLab

Twilio builds customer trust through a reliability culture, customer empathy, and accountability.

Andre Newman — Gremlin

This WTFinar tackles the beginning of understanding SRE. It focuses on service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs) – components of error budgets.

Container Solutions

This one’s juicy. At one point, the front-end was blocked up, so the back-end saw less traffic and scaled down. Then when the traffic came flooding back, the back-end was ill-prepared. We can all learn from this.

Coinbase

Cloudflare has what amounts to a sophisticated staging environment for testing new code.

Yan Zhai — Cloudflare

Sometimes rolling back doesn’t actually get you back to a good state, especially when there’s pent-up demand.

Rachel By the Bay

Here’s Google’s follow-up on a Google Meet outage earlier this month.

Google

Those are some seriously big database servers.

Josh Aas and James Renken — Let’s Encrypt

A great general overview of all aspects of incident response, including definitions and best practices.

Better Uptime

Check out what happens when you unleash a generalized language model AI on some log messages related to an incident.

Larry Lancaster — Zebrium

The CRE team at VMware undertook a project to find and reduce toil. Note that “with VMware CRE” does not mean “with some product named VMware CRE™”.

Gustavo Franco — VMware

This is Slack’s RCA for their outage earlier this month. This is a great example of a complex incident with many contributing factors — certainly no single “root cause” here.

Slack

TLS can be such a headache.

This was an interesting situation. There was a valid path to the USERTrust RSA Certification Authority, and there was also an expired path. The browser was able to find the valid chain, but the curl was not able to find it.

Adam Surak — Algolia

A well-researched article on shifting emphasis from incident prevention to learning and resilience.

Incidents cannot be prevented, because incidents are the inevitable result of success.

Alex Elman

This one’s worth reading through twice to let it sink in. It puts me in mind of this article by WIll Gallego, which is another thoughtful critique of error budgets.

Here are the claims I’m going to make:

1. Large incidents are much more costly to organizations than small ones, so we should work to reduce the risk of large incidents.
2. Error budgets don’t help reduce risk of large incidents.

Lorin Hochstein

This is a review of a few of the chapters of the book of the same title by Emil Stolarsky and Jaime Woo.

Have you read it too? I’d love to read your take on it!

Dean Wilson

This one’s worth reading the next time need to do an incident retrospective. The traps are:

1. Counterfactual reasoning
2. Normative language
3. Mechanistic reasoning

John Allspaw — Adaptive Capacity Labs

The skill in question is glue work, and I sure appreciate a good gluer when I see one.

Emily Arnott — Blameless

This one starts out by defining SRE, then goes into how to define your team and fill it with people.

Julie Gunderson — PagerDuty

Their on-call started out as four 24 hour shifts per person interspersed throughout the year. Find out how they transitioned to a new approach in a process that spanned the start of the pandemic.

Mary Moore-Simmons — GitHub

A new Meet version had a higher storage usage requirement, and a backend system filled up.

Google

This is webinar on alert fatigue, coming up on January 14.

Sarah Wells — Financial Times

Jamie Dobson — Container Solutions

The chaos experiments you do for security purposes can often expose weak points in reliability as well.

Aaron Rinehart — Verica

Kelly Shortridge — Capsul8

Here are four nifty outside-the-box ideas to use the data you may already have.

Emily Arnott — Blameless

Their custom incident management tool, DropSEV, can detect incident-worthy availability drops and file an incident automatically, obviating the need for an engineer to decide on severity level on the fly.

Joey Beyda and Ross Delinger — DropBox

This one has some additional detail on a November outage involving MySQL replication lag.

Keith Ballinger — GitHub

Tips and tricks for writing effective runbook documentation when you aren’t a technical writer

I like the discussion of the “Curse of Knowledge” cognitive bias.

Taylor Barnett — Transposit

Here’s one engineer’s SLO journey.

My main focus is on how I educated myself about SLOs and how applied this to my organization.

Ioannis Georgoulas

This blog is a redacted internal memo that aimed to familiarize SLOs with its audience, explain the value of an SLO culture, and describe how we would implement and roll them out.

Thomas Césaré-Herriau — Brex

Why would you do this? It’s all about Conway’s Law.

Ben Nadel

The folks at Adaptive Capacity Labs have seen a few patterns crop up over and over in their post-incident reviews. How many of these have you seen before?

John Allspaw — Adaptive Capacity Labs

Lots of complex contributing factors led to the main character being left behind in the movie Home Alone… so let’s treat it like a production incident!

Fred Hebert

This one includes a complex timeline showing the interplay of two pairs of bugs, where one in each pair masked the other.

Lorin Hochstein