Slight Reliability

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A brief mid-week update on my changing circumstances and the future of the podcast.

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This week I had the privilege of interviewing Liz Fong-Jones from honeycomb.io about DevRel, Developer Advocacy, and how that applies to SRE.

We discuss the difference between Developer Relations (DevRel) and Developer Advocacy, how Liz got into advocacy, how DevRel helps companies and the community, and some tips on how to get traction with SRE practices in your organisation.

You can check out Honeycomb's observability platform here: https://www.honeycomb.io/

You can find Liz on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/efong/
Website: https://www.lizthegrey.com/ (all her social/links are here)

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/
X: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

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This week I had the honour of chatting with Steve McGhee (former Google SRE, current Google Reliability Advocate, and co-author of Enterprise Roadmap to SRE).

We discuss the evolution of SRE from where it began at Google and how it is being adopted by enterprises around the world now (and why this is happening). We talk about getting leadership support and how we get reliability taken seriously, the lies we tell ourselves to justify incidents and issues, leveraging transformation projects to bring SRE to life, how SLOs can act as the fulcrum between dev and ops, the fallacy of the pyramid model of reliability... and so much more.

You can find Steve at on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemcghee/
X: https://twitter.com/stevemcghee

You can find Steve's book "Enterprise Roadmap to SRE" here: https://sre.google/resources/practices-and-processes/enterprise-roadmap-to-sre/

Steve also mentions the book "A Seat at the Table": https://itrevolution.com/product/a-seat-at-the-table/

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/
X: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

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This week on Slight Reliability Stephen discusses observability vendor lock-in. What is it? What does OpenTelemetry do to help? What areas are yet to be solved?

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

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This week we sit down and talk about SLOs with CPO and co-founder of Nobl9 Brian Singer.

We talk about the importance of reviewing operational effectiveness, getting buy in from leadership, using SLOs to reduce noise, how to implement SLOs within different cultures and structures, the parallels between security and reliability... and much more.

You can check out Nobl9's reliability and SLO platform here: https://www.nobl9.com/

You can find Brian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briantsinger/

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
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

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This week Stephen chats with Valeska Victoria about her time working as an SRE at eBay.

Valeska shares her data driven approach to SRE, having a voice as a less experienced engineer, handling incidents under high pressure, leveraging large language models to rapidly find the information you need during an incident, and much more.

You can check out PromptOps here:  https://www.promptops.com/

You can find Valeska on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valeska-victoria/

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
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

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This week Stephen chats with Dr. Vlad Ukis about his journey discovering, and then implementing SRE practices at Siemens Healthineers (which led to him writing a book).

They discuss how the evolution of infrastructure necessitates a shift in how we operate, the power of selling SRE practices, the SRE infrastructure used to build SLOs and reliability capabilities, how he implemented SLOs, and much more.

You can find Vlad's book "Establishing SRE Foundations" here: https://www.amazon.com/Establishing-Foundations-Step-Step-Organizations/dp/0137424604

You can find Vlad on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-vladyslav-ukis-5172ba32/

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
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

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Amin Astaneh (from Certo Modo) is back to discuss his experience working as a production engineer (SRE equivalent) at Meta.

Stephen and Amin discuss what it's like interviewing for big tech, "you build it, you own it", different SRE engagement models, SRE at different sizes of organisation, socialising your SRE success as a way to get traction, 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

The books Amin mentions are...

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/practice-of-cloud/9780133478549/

Leading Change:
https://www.kotterinc.com/bookshelf/leading-change/

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
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

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This week Stephen talks to Praveen Kasam from Diconium Digital Solutions about how he led SRE transformations.

Praveen shares his experience transitioning from development to SRE and how leveraging automation and bringing application knowledge to the ops team provided quick wins. He also covers how he later applied SRE concepts to uplift the wider organisation. If you are out there looking for advice on how to implement SRE in your organisation, this is the episode for you.

You can find Praveen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kasampraveen/

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/
X: 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 Stephen asks Eric Schabell (Director of Technical Marketing & Evangelism @ Chronosphere) about how dashboards fit into modern observability.

They discuss how untamed observability can lead to unexpectedly high cloud bills, the similarities between dashboards and documentation, the "know > triage > understand" workflow, and much more.

You can find Eric at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericschabell/
X: https://twitter.com/ericschabell
And you can find Chronosphere at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chronosphereio/

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/
X: 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