Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It sucks to be on-call when processes are not well defined and streamlined. Especially around the holidays. You really don't want to hear your phone repeatedly going off right when you're sitting for Christmas dinner with your loved ones or getting to unwrapping the good presents (the ones with the sparkly wrapping paper :P). Your on-call team’s stress levels reflects the health of your system, the cleanliness of your code and the culture of your organization.

When your production systems are hit with a critical issue, you can trust your DevOps team, your Sysadmins or your SREs to get the system back on track. This is a no brainer. And in turn, these folks need to be able to trust the rest of the team to let them do their jobs, be it engineering, customer support or product management. But where does this trust come from? It comes from understanding - the more you understand, the more you can trust.

Danny is an SRE at Auth0 and currently manages the reliability of systems that authenticate over 2.5 billion logins per month and is expected to have 99.9% (Three Nines) availability. He loves learning about systems and making changes that positively impact client happiness, employee happiness and long term stability and growth.

You have built a massively successful system. The users just can't get enough and request new features. Your developers crank out new services on a regular basis. Your DevOps/SRE team configures and scale your Kubernetes cluster (or clusters). As the system becomes more complicated and sophisticated you realize that there are common themes that repeat across all your services.

Pavlos is a Site Reliability Engineer based in Munich, Germany. He likes building software and expanding his knowledge around the reliability of services and their infrastructure. He has created a few open-source SRE projects such as the awesome-sre, Wheel of Misfortune, Availability Calculator, and awesome-chaos-engineering to assist teams and individuals in getting on board with the SRE culture.

Traditional Runbooks can become 10x more useful if they were automated or at least made executable (partly, if not fully). Shreyash Naithani from Microsoft Azure SRE team and author of "Practical Site Reliability Engineering" talks about how to take advantage of runbooks to eliminate toil.

Tradeoffs are hard. Think about the time when you had to choose between two equally compelling options - (a) addressing technical debt or (b) pushing out that long-awaited feature release, and risk breaking production. Or when your team couldn’t agree on where to draw the line on improving request latency versus shipping a major new update.

Once an incident is detected, taking the right actions automatically and immediately is the easiest step to make a sustainable and measurable improvement to your MTTR.

Intent-based Capacity Planning is Google's approach to declare reliability intent for a service and then solve for the most efficient resource allocation plan dynamically. Learn how you can start using this approach to effectively manage the reliability of your services running on your Kubernetes cluster.

Mark Henderson has been a Site Reliability Engineer at Stack Overflow since 2015. Before this he worked as the sole systems administrator at a small software company in Sydney, Australia. These days, he lives in South Australia and works from home with his wife and two children.