Every one of these 10 items is enough reason to read this article! This makes me want to go investigate some incidents right now.

  Fischer Jemison — Jeli

Slack shares with us in great detail why they use circuit breakers and how they rolled them out.

  Frank Chen — Slack

My favorite part of this one is the section on expectations. We need to socialize this to help reduce the pressure on folks going on call for the first time.

  Prakya Vasudevan — Squadcast

Status pages are marketing material. Prove me wrong.

  Ellen Steinke — Metrist

incidents have unusually high information density compared with day-to-day work, and they enable you to piggy-back on the experience of others

  Lisa Karlin Curtis — incident.io

These folks realized that they had two different use cases for the same data, real-time transactions and batch processing. Rather than try to find one DB that could support both, they fork two copies of the data.

  Xi Chen and Siliang Cao — Grab

It’s all about gathering enough information that you can ask new questions when something goes wrong, rather than being stuck with only answers to the questions you thought to ask in advance.

  Charity Majors

They needed the speed of local ephemeral SSDs but the reliability of network-based persistent disks. The solution: a linux MD option to mirror but prefer to read from the local disks. Neat!

  Glen Oakley — Discord

OS upgrades can be risky. LinkedIn developed a system to unify OS upgrade procedures and make them much less risky.

  Hengyang Hu, Dinesh Dhakal, and Kalyanasundaram Somasundaram — LinkedIn

In this article, I will introduce several improvements being made by the Microservices SRE Team, embedded with other teams.

  MizumotoShota — Mercari

What really stood out to me in this article is the Service Info section. A dashboard will quickly atrophy and lose its meaning without an explanation of what it’s for.

  Ali Sattari

When things go wrong, who is in charge? And what does it feel like to do that role?

This is a summary of a forum discussion about incident command, in case you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing.

  Emily Arnott — Blameless

Complex systems are weird, and a traditional deterministic view such as in older ITIL iterations doesn’t capture the situation. We need to evolve our practices.

  Jon Stevens-Hall

How can you design and interpret metrics for systems optimized for latency or throughput?

  Dan Slimmon

You can optimize for latency or throughput in a given system, but not both, since the two are directly at odds.

  Dan Slimmon

I really like that “Missing” section in their incident retrospective template. Gotta be careful with “Missed” though, that sounds like it could slide toward blame.

  Varun Achar — Razorpay

“Unreasonable” is a great way to avoid learning from an incident:

Labeling the responders actions as unreasonable enables us to explain away the failures in the law enforcement response as deficiencies with the individual responders.

  Lorin Hochstein

The author of this post doesn’t argue the fact that Fastly is clearly a single point of failure for many of their customers. But does that really matter?

  Jon Stevens-Hall
Full disclosure: Fastly, my employer, is mentioned.

Small problems can pile up unnoticed and interact weirdly to make a Big Problem that is incredibly hard to untangle. Maybe we should hunt down the small problems before they have a chance to trigger a Big one.

  Dan Slimmon

Apologizing for bugs encourages a lot of problematic thought patterns, much in the same way as blaming people for incidents.

  Dan Slimmon

Should you go multi-cloud? What should you do during an incident involving a third-party dependency? What about after? Read this one for all that and more.

  Lisa Karlin Curtis — incident.io
Full disclosure: Fastly, my employer, is mentioned.

An introduction to the concept of common ground breakdown, using the Uvalde shooting in the US as a case study.

  Lorin Hochstein

The comments section is full of some pretty great advice, including questions you can ask while interviewing to suss out whether the on-call culture is going to be livable.

  u/dicksoutfoeharambe (and others) — reddit

From the archives, this is an analysis of a report on the 2018 major outage at TSB Bank in the UK.

  Jon Stevens-Hall

You can determine whether backoff will actually help your system, and this article does a great job of telling you how.

  Marc Brooker

I’ve read (and written) plenty of IC training guides, but this is the first time I’ve come across the concept of a “Hands-Off Update”. I’m definitely going to use that!

  Dan Slimmon

This is a really great exlpanation of observability from an angle I haven’t seen before.

a metric dashboard only contributes to observability if its reader can interpret the curves they’re seeing within a theory of the system under study.

  Dan Slimmon

They asked four people and got four answers that run the gamut.

  Jeff Martens — Metrist

How Airbnb automates incident management in a world of complex, rapidly evolving ensemble of microservices.

Includes an overview of their ChatOps system that would make for a great blueprint to build your own.

  Vlad Vassiliouk — Airbnb

Rigidly categorizing incidents can cause problems, according to this article.

From the customer’s viewpoint… well why would they care what kind of technical classification it is being forced into?

  Jon Stevens-Hall

Lots of great advice in this one.

• If no human needs to be involved, it’s pure automation.
• If it doesn’t need a response right now, it’s a report.
• If the thing you’re observing isn’t a problem, it’s a dashboard.
• If nothing actually needs to be done, you should delete it.

   Leon Adato — New Relic

Using the recent Atlassian outage as a case study, this article explains the importance of communication during an incident, then goes over best practices.

  Martha Lambert — incident.io

My favorite part about this is the advice to “lower the cost of being wrong”. Important in any case, but especially during incident response.

  Emily Arnott — Blameless

There are some interesting incidents in this issue: one involving DNS and another with an overload involving over-eager retries.

  Jakub Oleksy — GitHub

A great read both for interviewers and interviewees.

  Myra Nizami — Blameless

Their main advice is to avoid starting with a microservice architecture, and only transition to one after your monolith has matured and you have a good reason to do so.

  Tomas Fernandez and Dan Ackerson — semaphore