Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The current tech winter has a number of glaring stories — cyclical as they may be, there’s one truth that’s been gleaned over more than the rest; the money spent on internal software tools to support tech infrastructure is bloated. And there’s nothing cyclical about this infrastructure spending.

A Recap of SRECon 2023 Americas by guest author Sebastian Vietz.

In today’s turbulent times, companies big and small are being pushed to do more with less. Budgets are getting tighter and companies are being pressured to serve customers who demand 24/7 availability from their applications and services. To meet these demands and remain competitive, enterprises are adopting cloud-first strategies and developing applications with microservice architectures.

Last week, over five hundred SREs gathered in Santa Clara to share the latest research, tips, tricks, best practices, and more for site reliability engineering. They were joined by some of the biggest names in the reliability space. And, yes, Gremlin was there to answer any and all questions about chaos engineering and proactive reliability. After three days of great conversations and insightful talk, let’s take a look at some of the themes we heard weaving through SRECon.

Kubernetes can be tough to troubleshoot and remediate fast, especially when you have many interdependent services. This blog, part 3 of 3 in the “8 SRE Best Practices to Help Developers Troubleshoot Kubernetes” series, describes the Kubernetes observability foundation StackState has built to support SRE best practices and enable rapid remediation of issues.

Everything you need to know about Mean Time Between Incidents (MTBI) and how it can help Site Reliability Engineers.

Site reliability engineers can amplify their reach and influence across teams with Cortex in their toolbox. With the ability to define clear standards and drive progress, Cortex enables everyone at an organization to adopt an SRE mindset. Make sure to visit us at SREcon to learn more about how Cortex can serve as a single source of truth for your SRE team!

Last year, I wrote How We Define SRE Work. This article described how I came up with the charter for the SRE team, which we bootstrapped right around then. It’s been a while. The SRE team is now four engineers and a manager. We are involved in all sorts of things across the organization, across all sorts of spheres. We are embedded in teams and we handle training, vendor management, capacity planning, cluster updates, tooling, and so on.

Maintaining reliable Kubernetes systems is not easy, especially for people who are not Kubernetes experts. This blog, part 2 of 3 in the “8 SRE Best Practices to Help Developers Troubleshoot Kubernetes” series, explains 8 simple best practices SREs can follow to help developers and other SREs build knowledge and effectively troubleshoot issues in applications running on Kubernetes.