Join us at this very first edition of Demo Days where this month we’ll be meeting the team at Reliably who will give a live product demo showcasing how their platform can help you to get better at operating with greater predictability and less anxiety. See Reliably in action and discover developer-first reliability as one of their experts will guide us through the product and its features.

There is a yawning gap opening up between the best and the rest — the elite top few percent of engineering teams are making incredible gains year on year in velocity, reliability and human compatibility, whilst the bottom 50% are actually losing ground. The loss has nothing to do with engineering ability. Take an engineer out of an elite-performing team and place them in the bottom 50%, and they become subpar too; take an engineer out of a mediocre team and embed them in an elite team, and they are pulling their weight within the year.

Starting small and currently serving billions of requests per month is never an easy path. Stoyan Yanev, Principal Engineer and Krasimir Petrov, Senior Software Engineer at News UK will show how they built their infrastructure and the decisions and compromises that had to be made along the way. The talk will be centered around NewsKits API and the importance of Reliability before opening up a discussion among the group.

Objectives are fantastic! They convey the desired end goal while allowing progress to be measured. During this lightning talk, Mick Roper, lead software engineer at Reliably, will discuss the power of objectives.

Serverless technologies offer a great foundation for building resilient applications that can withstand much turbulence in the production environment. For instance, AWS Lambda automatically deploys your code to three availability zones and replaces faulty virtual machines on the fly. Despite this, there are still many other types of failures that can still affect our application. Perhaps there is an outage with a third-party service we depend on, or maybe a sudden surge in throughput has pushed us over the throughput limit and caused some user requests to be throttled.

Security and reliability have a lot in common. So much in fact, that the tools used for one are often well suited for the other. The only thing you need is the right mindset. In this talk Mika Boström will go over the principles, ideas and share real world examples. You may realise you've been doing both already.

Steve Wade will talk about his experiences to date empowering developers and importantly the wider business to care about the reliability of the applications they provide to customers. He will discuss the pillars that make up reliability, along with his hypothesis and results on implementing each of them. Steve will tap into his experiences working in a range of sectors including financial services on how he made companies make changes pre-pandemic, as well as the additional challenges organisations face in the future post pandemic. Steve aims to make sure attendees leave with a toolkit of ideas as well as lessons learnt so you don't make the same assumptions he did.

Understanding Error Budgets: The who, what, when and why of pre-incident reporting.

Slides available here: https://www.slideshare.net/russmiles/dont-be-a-victim-of-your-own-success-using-service-levels-to-give-a-consistent-user-experience

How to calculate the impact on service level objectives, and how to harden them.