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

Here’s how Algolia was affected by the Salt Stack RCE vulnerability earlier this year and how they dealt with it.

Julien Lemoine — Algolia

Includes background information on SRE and example interview questions.

Marlo Vernon — Splunk

DNS, TLS certificates, and Unicode, among other issues, make for some great (and cringe-worthy) stories.

Adam LaGreca, with stories from Charity Majors, Matthew Fornaciari, Liran Haimovitch, Daniel Spoonhower, Lee Liu, and Tina Huang

In this story of a failover gone wrong, they discovered that they had had innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit set incorrectly, explaining how they lost data when they weren’t expecting to.

Rajeev Rai — Razorpay

This is a nice little comic about the role of SRE. Engineer the bridge, don’t be the bridge.

Piyush Verma — Last9

Lots of great concepts about human/computer systems, including this gem:

log facts, not interpretations

Fred Hebert

In this troubleshooting story, an innocent-seeming dependency upgrade introduced a subtle but nasty bug.

Jordan Place — Transposit

Google released an update to their post-analysis for the December 14th outage involving Google OAuth.

Every service needs a couple of big hammers that are easy to swing.

Jennifer Mace — O’Reilly and Google

Answer: automation. Lots of automation. And automation of the automation.

Fred Lin, Harish Dattatraya Dixit, and Sriram Sankar — Facebook

Oh, how quaint! This article was written back when people traveled for the holidays.

Ashley Roof — Transposit

Surprise! Fortunately, there are some ways to fix this limitation.

Heidi Howard, Ittai Abraham — Decentralized Thoughts

A common question when a company is implementing incident management is: why do we need this process?

It turns out that the easiest way to answer this question is to look at the world of unsuccessful incident management.

Kintaba

Whether you’re new to Just Culture or an old hand, there’s a lot of great detail in this article.

Tory Thompson — Firehouse

Not sold yet on full service ownership for development teams? This interview may help.

Vivian Chan — PagerDuty

While ostensibly about Jeli.io, this article makes a great case for why incident analysis is important in general and what kind of data we should be trying to gather.

John Allspaw — Adaptive Capacity Labs

A new feature roll-out resulted in impaired service for some customers.

The adaptive universe: where adaptations to challenges feed back and cause more challenges, requiring more adaptations.

Lorin Hochstein

Our first GraphQL release was twice as slow as our old REST API. Here’s how we fixed it.

Another great example of making a duplicate request to a new API in the background to test it before deploying it.

Michael P. Geraci — OkCupid

It’s really easy to get an “uptime” SLO wrong, and a lying SLO can give you a false sense of security.

Piyush Verma — Last9

I love this quote. I feel like this is the “root cause” of every incident:

As for the underlying cause of the incident (or the “root cause” if you insist on using such language), that has to be the fact that our assumptions as teams or individuals are ultimately formed by our past experiences.

Oliver Leaver-Smith — Sky Betting & Gaming

I really love the concept of requisite complexity. This article has me thinking about a big project I’m working on in a new light.

Fred Hebert

They expected to max out an integer primary key column sometime in 2021. Then the pandemic hit and their timetable suddenly accelerated along with their traffic.

Jeff Pollard — Strava

I shouldn’t enjoy reading these so much… got any of your own to share?

Dean Wilson

The idea of borrowing expertise makes me think of Bainbridge’s Ironies of Automation.

Mandi Walls — PagerDuty

Heroku’s report explains how their service was impacted as a result of the big Amazon Kinesis outage a couple weeks back.

Heroku

This primer focuses on ensuring that your SLOs actually match up with business objectives.

Irving Popovetsky — Honeycomb