Everything fails all the time. Knowing how to deal with these failures in serverless applications becomes essential to building resilient, highly-available systems. In traditional monolithic applications, catching errors and handling retries is relatively straightforward. But as our systems become more distributed, we now have multiple (often asynchronous) components processing events from several sources, all with vastly different retry behaviors and failure mechanisms. Utilizing old patterns can cause errors to get swallowed, creating brittle, unreliable systems that are difficult to debug and hard to maintain.

While outage-driven news headlines can cause stock prices to plummet short term, the performance-driven reputation loss is a slow burn for longer-term customer loss. This session compares slowdowns vs outages and the resulting need for insight more than observability. By understanding these difference, you'll be ready to drive agile applications, gain funding for lowering technical debt, and focus on customer retention.

Recent world-impacting events have caused us all to have to rethink the way we go about our daily work; in this talk, we'll look at how some of the pillars of Resilience Engineering might help you and your team deal with the changes we're all being forced to confront.

In this session, we will dive into a case study of how a team can recover & improve a distributed system after a major incident. Distributed systems are more prone to failure than other systems due to their incredible complexity and scale, and incidents are a fact of life with these systems.

Tammy Butow ( Principal Site Reliability Engineer @ Gremlin ) answers the question, what is SRE?