PagerDuty put a call out on Twitter, asking what folks are doing to improve the on-call experience at their companies.

Here’s part three in the series. This one’s about sharding, horizontal scaling, and client versus server complexity.

Here’s how Azure’s new availability zones change the way highly available apps can be designed on Azure.

The meltdown patch seems to be having a disproportionate impact on Redis performance. Here’s Grab’s story of how they figured out what was up and what they did to deal with it.

I don’t often do the Twitter thing, but this chain by Charity Majors is worth reading. Is that what they call it? a chain?

Google on the advantages of Cloud Spanner’s strong consistency and why to use it. I’m still looking out for an explanation of what the downside to Spanner is…

Just to be clear, this is about how critical it is that Facebook keep their machine learning applications running, rather than using machine learning to design disaster recovery solutions.

This article is about useful error messages, which are important both for the customer experience and for operations. I’m not sure what really qualifies as a “mainframe” these days, though….

LinkedIn is open-sourcing two tools that they use for troubleshooting during incidents. Fossor automates running data-gathering can and Ascii Etch displays graphs using ASCII art.

Local Rationale: the reasoning and context behind a decision that an operator made. Here’s Todd Conklin reminding us to find out what was really going on when the benefit of hindsight makes a decision seem irrational.

In part two of the series I linked to last week, Tyler Treat introduces data replication strategies including replicating data to all replicas before returning or just a quorum.

Here’s something I wasn’t aware of: hospitals have their own version of the ICS.

In this blogpost, we discuss why you should create a policy on how SREs and devs respond to SLO violations, and provide some ideas for the structure and components of that policy.

Now this is neat. This research team pings basically the entire internet all the time and can track outages across the globe. They can see things like Egypt shutting down Internet access for all of its citizens and the effects of hurricanes.

This is a summary of a couple of talks from Influx Days. I especially like the bit about Baron Schwartz’s talk on the pitfalls of anomaly detection.

Meltdown is especially scary because the fix has the potential to significantly impact performance.

Gremlin Inc. helps folks simulate failure, but what happens when they turn their tools on their own infrastructure? In this article, they share all sorts of juicy details about how they set up their experiments, what they hoped to prove and thought might happen, and then what actually happened, including an unexpected failure mode.

This article series isn’t actually about writing your own new distributed log from scratch — probably not a good idea. It’s about learning the fundamental principles involved in designing such systems so that we can better understand them while operating and using them.

What do you do about the scary system that nobody touches and everyone is afraid will fall over some day? This article shows you a concrete plan for digging in and dealing with the skeleton in the closet.

It’s Julia Evans, writing at Stripe!

In this post, we’ll explain why we chose to build on top of Kubernetes. We’ll examine how we integrated Kubernetes into our existing infrastructure, our approach to building confidence in (and improving) our Kubernetes’ cluster’s reliability, and the abstractions we’ve built on top of Kubernetes.

AppOptics’s take on alerting, including this gem:

More often, our metric choices and threshold values are guided by our preexisting tools. Hence, if our tools cannot measure latency, we do not alert on latency.

How many times have you seen a migration or transition reach 90% completion and stall? This SysAdvent author urges caution in engaging a “hybrid cloud” vendor solution.

Juniper discusses the evolution of the Network Engineer role into Network Reliability Engineer (NRE).

Just like sysadmins have graduated from technicians to technologists as SREs, the NRE title is a declaration of a new culture and serves as the zenith for all that we do and have as engineers of network invincibility.

A primer on setting up load testing for WebDAV using Apache Jmeter.

An interesting debugging story involving a tricky data corruption bug in RavenDB.

I’ve lost count of the number of incidents I’ve witnessed that were caused by TCP connections in which one end disappeared. This cautionary tale has a pretty interesting cause as well.

In many ways, what you do with an incident post-mortem can be as important as the post-mortem itself. Below, I explain why and offer tips on what to do after the post-mortem is complete.

If the title of this article doesn’t make sense to you, then you may well have been interpreting traceroute results incorrectly. Definitely worth a read.

Gremlin inc. is live! Here’s the official “coming out” post for this chaos engineering startup.

There’s so much to delve into in this long article about Netflix’s infrastructure. It’s part of the book, Explain the Cloud Like I’m 10, but I didn’t really find the explanations watered-down or over-simplified.

A great description of booking.com‘s incident response and followup process.

Incidents are like presents: You love them as long as you don’t get the same present twice.

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.