SREcon17 Europe/Middle East/Africa

The purpose of an SRE team is to keep its services up, reliable, performant and efficient. How do effective SRE teams do this?


We'll run through an overview of key SRE competencies: monitoring and alerting, incident response, disaster recovery, performance and efficiency, change management and capacity planning.


We'll also look at the habits of successful SRE teams and some common pitfalls.

All kinds of applications run on Linux, from web servers to distributed database engines and embedded applications. Troubleshooting performance in the field, especially when invasive profilers can't be used, is a delicate art that requires a solid understanding of the system and low-overhead tools. In this workshop, we will visit a spectrum of Linux performance monitoring tools.

We will start with a simple performance checklist based on the USE method, including tools like top, iostat, vmstat, mpstat, sar, and others. Then, once we identify the overloaded resource, we will dig in deeper using perf: tracepoints, hardware events, dynamic probes, and USDT. We will also collect stack traces of heavy events (CPU usage, disk accesses, network) and visualize them using flame graphs.

Finally, we will discuss the emerging superpower for Linux performance monitoring: BPF and BCC. This is a new kernel technology that enables low-overhead, super-efficient monitoring and tracing tools, which perform aggregation closer to the source where the events occur and provide useful information at a fraction of the cost. We will review a performance checklist based on BCC tools, and explore one-liners from the general-purpose trace and argdist tools.

From post-mortems to operations manuals to code comments, writing things down for others is an unavoidable part of the life of an SRE.

In this workshop, you’ll learn writing principles to help you present technical information from two experienced Google technical writers - and each other! Through a series of pair-work exercises you’ll work through a variety of topics to improve the clarity, readability, and effectiveness of your writing, and possibly think about a toothbrush like you’ve never thought about one before. If you've never before taken any technical writing training, this workshop is perfect for you. If you've taken technical writing training, this class will serve as a great refresher.

There is a small amount of pre-reading for participants in this workshop (~30 minutes of reading about basic technical writing concepts).

The workshop runs for two hours with a short break.

While you can learn a lot by emitting metrics from your application, some insights can only be gained by looking at OS metrics. Yet OS metrics, despite being commonly used are also frequently misunderstood.

In this hands-on workshop, we will go over commonly used CPU, memory, disk and network metrics, and make sure we understand each of them. We will experiment with old & new tools to acquire and analyse metrics, evaluate a black-box workloads by looking at metrics, and assess the effect of extreme metric values on simple applications. During our adventure, we will learn about Linux internals, it’s underlying optimizations and unexpected limitations.

To participate, just make sure to bring a laptop, and have a chromium-based browser installed.

Statistics is the art of extracting information from data. In this workshop, we will visit the statistical methods that are relevant for operating modern IT infrastructures. Containerized cloud architectures are incredibly difficult monitoring targets. Creating probabilistic models of the behaviors of these systems, that can be used for reliable predictions is a very difficult task. In fact, it's so difficult that I don't think anyone has done that, yet. We will certainly not try to here.

Instead, we will take a different path in this workshop, and talk about statistical methods that are known to work and provided value for your daily job as a SRE. In this workshop you will learn:

• How to measure the quality of APIs you provide and consume.


• How to interpret the telemetry data that is emitted from the systems you are running.


• How to aggregate metrics from single nodes to service-level views.

Topics we will cover in depths include: data visualisation, averages, percentiles, histograms, regressions, robustness and mergeability. We will cover the material from a theoretical and a practical perspective. Bring pen and paper as well as your laptop!

There are a lot of white, male, heterosexuals in the Tech Industry, this demographic makes up the majority by a large margin. This is also the demographic which holds the most privilege.


Homogenization in our industry is bad. We need the creative ideas and mindset that diversity brings to allow us to innovate and build amazing things.


Those with privilege and power need to understand it, and learn how to use it be become an ally to those people who are in marginalized parts of our industry to help create safe space and welcoming spaces where people can feel that they can express themselves and be celebrated for their differences.


This talk will unpack privilege and discuss how you can be an effective ally to those who have no voice.