In this "bumpisode", hosts and producers of Prodcast (including our new co-host, Matt Siegler!) reflect on the previous season and introduce the new season's focus on upcoming trends in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and AI, and the friends we make along the way. They also introduce new elements we are bringing in with Season 4, such as a video format and a feedback form.

This episode features Javi Beltran, a Google engineering lead who created the "Telebot" theme song. With our beloved hosts, Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg, Beltran discusses the origins of the song, created in 2012 for Google's paging system. The song was meant to add a touch of levity to what could be a stressful situation for engineers on-call. Beltran also unveils a new, more modern remix of “Telebot” (created in collaboration with our host, Jordan Greenberg!) which will be used as the intro theme for the podcast's next season.

In this episode of the Prodcast, guests Dominic Hutton (Staff SRE, HashiCorp) and Niccolo' Cascarano (Senior Staff SRE at Google) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to dive into configurations. They discuss the differences between imperative and declarative configuration, explore the benefits and challenges of each approach, and the need for careful consideration when choosing between the two. Ultimately, the goal is to achieve reliable and maintainable systems through effective configuration management.

This episode features Casey Rosenthal (Founder, Cirrusly.ai) and John Allspaw (Founder and Principal, Adaptive Capacity Labs), joining our hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg. Together they discuss how resilience appears in Software Engineering and SRE and explore the importance of understanding the human factors involved in adapting to system failures—highlighting the need for a more qualitative and holistic approach to understanding how engineers successfully adapt to system behavior and improving overall reliability.

In this episode of the Prodcast, we are joined by guests Christina Schulman (Staff SRE, Google) and Dr. Laura Maguire (Principal Engineer, Trace Cognitive Engineering). They emphasize the human element of SRE and the importance of fostering a culture of collaboration, learning, and resilience in managing complex systems. They touch upon topics such as the need for diverse perspectives and collaboration in incident response, the necessity of embracing complexity, and explore concepts such as aerodynamic stability, and more.

In this episode, Cody Smith (CTO and Co-founder, Camus Energy) & Trisha Weir (SRE Department Lead, Google) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg, to discuss their experience developing Maglev, a highly available and distributed network load balancer (NLB) that is an integral part of the cloud architecture that manages traffic that comes in to a datacenter. Starting with Maglev’s humble beginnings as a skunkworks effort, Cody and Trisha recount the challenges they faced, and emphasize the importance of psychological safety, collaboration, and adaptability in SRE innovation.

In this episode, guests Narayan Desai (Principal SRE, Google) and Pat Somaru (Senior Production Engineer, Meta) join hosts Steve McGhee and Florian Rathgeber to discuss the challenges of observability and working with profiling data. The discussion covers intriguing topics like noise reduction, workload modeling, and the need for better tools and techniques to handle high-cardinality data.

This episode features Google engineers Wilmer van der Gaast (Production on-tall) and Andy Sykes (Senior Staff Systems Engineer, SRE), joining hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg, to discuss the development and maintenance of Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8). They highlight the initial motivations for creating the service, technical challenges like cache poisoning and load balancing, as well as the collaborative effort between SRE and SWE teams to address these issues. They also reflect on the evolving nature of SRE and advice for aspiring SREs.

Guests Jordan Chernev (Senior Technology Executive) and Scott Bowers (SRE, Gearbox Software) who hail from the retail and gaming industries, respectively, join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg  to discuss the unique challenges of Site Reliability Engineering in their industries. They share the importance of aligning SLOs with user experience, strategies for handling spikes in traffic, communicating with users during outages, and investing in reliability.

Sarah Butt (Principal Engineer, Centralized Incident Response, Salesforce) and Vrai Stacey (Staff Software Engineer, Google) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to dive into incident response—particularly tooling and software for reliability incidents. Tune in for an in-depth discussion on topics such as the importance of communication and collaboration during incidents, and the role of tooling in supporting incident response processes. Sarah and Vrai also share personal takeaways from incidents they have experienced.