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This week I check in and give an update on work, life, and my attempts at bringing to life SRE practices in the world of non-production environment management.

You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

This episode was sponsored by SquaredUp. SquaredUp combines all your data with awesome dashboards, analytics, health rollup, and notifications, into a unified observability portal. Using a data mesh architecture, SquaredUp is a beautifully simple way to get instant access to the insights that matter, whenever you need them. If you want to know more head over to https://squaredup.com/ to sign up for your free account.

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This week I'm joined by Karanveer Anand, SRE Technical Program Manager at Google to discuss blameless post-mortems. We cover:

🦅 The recent Crowdstrike outage and their public post-mortem
🚑 When do we do a blameless post-mortem?
😕 How do we do a blameless post-mortem?
✅ How do we make sure action items are followed through?
📰 The power of learning from post-mortems created by other teams and orgs

...and much more.

You can find Karanveer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karanveer/

You can find Crowdstrike's preliminary post incident report here: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/falcon-content-update-preliminary-post-incident-report/

You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

This episode was sponsored by SquaredUp. SquaredUp combines all your data with awesome dashboards, analytics, health rollup, and notifications, into a unified observability portal. Using a data mesh architecture, SquaredUp is a beautifully simple way to get instant access to the insights that matter, whenever you need them. If you want to know more head over to https://squaredup.com/ to sign up for your free account.

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This week Zach Michel from https://middleware.io/ and I discuss the state of OpenTelemetry and what it means to adopt it. We cover:

🌩️ Achieving observability in a SaaS world
🥫 Context propagation - the magic sauce of OTEL
🚪 The telemetry gateway concept and leveraging the OTEL collector
🪵 The state of OpenTelemetry logging
🫂 Making use of the OpenTelemetry community

...and much more.

You can find Zach on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zamichel/

You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/

For a list of ways to interact with the OpenTelemetry community go to:
https://opentelemetry.io/community/

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

This episode was sponsored by SquaredUp. SquaredUp combines all your data with awesome dashboards, analytics, health rollup, and notifications, into a unified observability portal. Using a data mesh architecture, SquaredUp is a beautifully simple way to get instant access to the insights that matter, whenever you need them. If you want to know more head over to https://squaredup.com/ to sign up for your free account.

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In Episode 80 Niall Murphy talked about the need for SREs to be better at articulating the value of our work. In this episode I'm joined by ex-Googler and Engineering Director (SRE) at Culture Amp Artem Yakimenko about how we might achieve this.

We discuss both quantifiable and qualitative approaches including leveraging the untapped data in support tickets, customer sentiment and rankings, the relationship between finance and performance, the link between user design and performance, and so much more.

Books mentioned in the episode:

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People
By Susan Weinschenk
https://www.amazon.com.au/Things-Every-Designer-Needs-People/dp/0321767535

You can find Artem on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/temikus/

You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

This episode was sponsored by SquaredUp. SquaredUp combines all your data with awesome dashboards, analytics, health rollup, and notifications, into a unified observability portal. Using a data mesh architecture, SquaredUp is a beautifully simple way to get instant access to the insights that matter, whenever you need them. If you want to know more head over to https://squaredup.com/ to sign up for your free account.

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In the world of SRE we constantly talk about defining SLOs, but what about evolving them over time? This week I chat with SRE Tech Lead Dom Finn about just that. We cover the relationship between reliability and user analytics, latency classes as a way to speak SLOs with business stakeholders, the role of NFRs and how the thresholds differ from SLOs, and much more.

Books mentioned in the episode:

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
By David Deutch
https://www.amazon.com.au/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Transform-World/dp/0143121359

Turn The Ship Around!
By David Marquette
https://davidmarquet.com/turn-the-ship-around-book/

You can find Dom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dom-finn/

You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

This episode was sponsored by SquaredUp. SquaredUp combines all your data with awesome dashboards, analytics, health rollup, and notifications, into a unified observability portal. Using a data mesh architecture, SquaredUp is a beautifully simple way to get instant access to the insights that matter, whenever you need them. If you want to know more head over to https://squaredup.com/ to sign up for your free account.

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This week I talk about the impact of SaaS-first technology strategies on the work of an SRE. I pose questions about observability, ownership, on-call, and how much control we have over reliability.

You can find the Bleeding Tech blog on Medium: https://medium.com/@stownshend

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week I chat with Dan Slimmon about applying the approach doctors use to treat patient symptoms during incident response.

You can find Dan's blog at https://blog.danslimmon.com/ or connect with him on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danslimmon/

You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

This episode was sponsored by SquaredUp. SquaredUp combines all your data with awesome dashboards, analytics, health rollup, and notifications, into a unified observability portal. Using a data mesh architecture, SquaredUp is a beautifully simple way to get instant access to the insights that matter, whenever you need them. If you want to know more head over to https://squaredup.com/ to sign up for your free account.

Send us a text

This week I hear about all things Kubernetes from Komodor CTO and co-founder Itiel Shwartz. We chat about the promise that was made when Kubernetes first entered the industry, the challenge of getting developers engaged and capable of working in Kubernetes, my hate/hate relationship with Helm but its important contribution to the Kubernetes project, Kubernetes observability, and so much more.

You can find the Kubernetes for Humans podcast here:
https://komodor.com/blog/the-kubernetes-for-humans-podcast/
Or find out more about Komodor here:
https://komodor.com/
Or find Itiel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itiel-shwartz-18542853/

You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

This episode was sponsored by SquaredUp. SquaredUp combines all your data with awesome dashboards, analytics, health rollup, and notifications, into a unified observability portal. Using a data mesh architecture, SquaredUp is a beautifully simple way to get instant access to the insights that matter, whenever you need them. If you want to know more head over to https://squaredup.com/ to sign up for your free account.

Send us a text

This week I sit down and have a discussion with Amin Astaneh (from Certo Modo) about CI/CD. We cover the power of the standard change as a way to navigate ITIL while still implementing DevOps practices, what to monitor to make your CI/CD observable, single piece flow, testing in production, and so much more.

You can find Amin on his company website https://certomodo.io, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aminastaneh/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/aastaneh

You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

This episode was sponsored by SquaredUp. SquaredUp combines all your data with awesome dashboards, analytics, health rollup, and notifications, into a unified observability portal. Using a data mesh architecture, SquaredUp is a beautifully simple way to get instant access to the insights that matter, whenever you need them. If you want to know more head over to https://squaredup.com/ to sign up for your free account.

Send us a text

"Environment issues are just incidents that happened to occur in a non-production environment"... so why do we treat them so differently?

In this first episode of the 2024 season I reflect on how we handle incidents in non-prod environments.

(Note: Had a few issues with noise suppression in OBS Studio cutting off the start of some words, will sort it for the next episode)

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre