Send us a text This week I'm joined by the wonderful Hanson Ho to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities in making our mobile apps observable! We cover... 📱 The mobile/backend observability divide ✍️ The challenge of distributed tracing on mobile apps 🌏 The entire device runtime environment matters for your app 👤 The quest for user-centric…

Send us a text Owen joins forces with Chud and Mandy to compete in a body building competition while Ridge looks for answers to his past in the Hall of the Infinite Ledger. Starring Tom Wardle (GM), Paul Harrop (Owen Sunderland), and Stephen Townshend (Ridge Mackelbie). Troika was created by the Melsonain Arts Council: https://www.melsonia.com/ You…

Send us a text This week on the I'm joined once more by SRE leader Michelle Casey who gives a broad and shallow introduction to resilience engineering. We cover... 🏋️‍♀️ Reliability VS Robustness VS Resilience 🧩 What is a complex system? 🔢 Safety one/safety two 🧠 Mental models 😩 Human error ...and so much more. Resources from this episode: Four con…

Send us a text New episodes released every two weeks! After conquering the Crimson Citadel, our heroes return to the city of Troika. They make new friends, drink exotic cocktails, grow stronger, get some body art, and *finally* take a well deserved rest. Starring Tom Wardle (GM), Paul Harrop (Owen Sunderland), and Stephen Townshend (Ridge Mackelbie…

Send us a text This week on the 100th episode I'm joined by DevOps and Resilience Engineering legend John Allspaw to talk about learning (especially from incidents). We discuss... 📒 Classroom VS situated learning 🤝 The myth of the perfect handover ITIL as a coping strategy to try and make sense of the organic, wild, and messy 🥕 How you cannot incen…

Send us a text This week on Tales from the Humpback Sky our heroes (and Thalorg) scamper to escape the Crimson Citadel as it falls from the sky. Starring Tom Wardle (GM), Paul Harrop (Owen Sunderland), and Stephen Townshend (Ridge Mackelbie). Troika was created by the Melsonain Arts Council: https://www.melsonia.com/ You can find out more about Tro…

Send us a text Our heroes delve into the depths of the Crimson Citadel to uncover it's disturbing secrets, and face their greatest challenge yet. Starring Tom Wardle (GM), Paul Harrop (Owen Sunderland), and Stephen Townshend (Ridge Mackelbie). Troika was created by the Melsonain Arts Council: https://www.melsonia.com/ You can find out more about Tr…

Send us a text This week I'm joined by SRE leader Trent Hornibrook who shares a story about how he improved on-call early in his career, and then we explore the broader theme of focusing on the things that matter in observability, incident response, on-call, and beyond. We discuss... 🔌 Empowering engineers to implement change in your org 🧑‍🍼 Focusi…

Send us a text Owen and Ridge get put in a waiting room, and respond accordingly. Starring Tom Wardle (GM), Paul Harrop (Owen Sunderland), and Stephen Townshend (Ridge Mackelbie). Troika was created by the Melsonain Arts Council: https://www.melsonia.com/ You can find out more about Troika here: https://www.troikarpg.com/ All music is by Harrison S…

Send us a text This week I'm joined by SRE leader Andrew Hatch from Cisco ThousandEyes to talk about a dirty word in the resilience community... root cause. In this excellent conversation we explore... 🌌 Is the root cause of every incident the big bang? 🦖 How the value of root cause degrades as complexity increases 🫣 That if the culture is not blam…

Send us a text Owen and Ridge face down impossible odds in the grand arena, and Owen comes face to face with one of his own kind. Starring Tom Wardle (GM), Paul Harrop (Owen Sunderland), and Stephen Townshend (Ridge Mackelbie). Troika was created by the Melsonain Arts Council: https://www.melsonia.com/ You can find out more about Troika here: https…

Send us a text This week I'm joined by David Dick from 2 Steps to (finally!) discuss synthetic monitoring. We cover... 🤖 What is synthetic monitoring? 🦾 What are the benefits and drawbacks to using it? ☢️ Non-web based synthetics (the tough stuff) 🍹 Combining RUM and synthetics 🫢 Does synthetics need an OTEL-like framework? ...and much more. You ca…

Send us a text Owen and Ridge board the imposing Crimson Citadel and experience crippling bureaucracy at its finest. Starring Tom Wardle (GM), Paul Harrop (Owen Sunderland), and Stephen Townshend (Ridge Mackelbie). Troika was created by the Melsonain Arts Council: https://www.melsonia.com/ You can find out more about Troika here: https://www.troika…

Send us a text Join Tom, Paul, and Stephen as they play the science fiction RPG "Troika" and embark on a multiversal adventure across time, space, and reality. Starring Tom Wardle (GM), Paul Harrop (Owen Sunderland), and Stephen Townshend (Ridge Mackelbie). Troika was created by the Melsonain Arts Council: https://www.melsonia.com/ You can find out…

Send us a text Owen and Ridge are given a quest by the mysterious Professor Eska Howell, and our two adventurers make the way to rescue his assistant, Kennick. Starring Tom Wardle (GM), Paul Harrop (Owen Sunderland), and Stephen Townshend (Ridge Mackelbie). Troika was created by the Melsonain Arts Council: https://www.melsonia.com/ You can find out…

Send us a text This week I'm joined by Cin7 Engineering Director Milan Brown to unpack the challenges of technology management and leadership. We discuss... ✖️ Theory X vs Theory Y management 🗣️ Intention based leadership and communication 🏢 Conditions in an org for people to thrive 😵‍💫 How do you learn to manage and lead? 🫤 Managing people when yo…

Send us a text This week Leon Adato and I break down the state of applying for roles in tech. We cover... 📝 What a resume or CV is and is not 🤝 Leveraging your connections rather than relying on applying cold 🪄 How most job descriptions are works of fiction 🦾 White-fonting to game AI resume assessment 🧪 Experimental ways we could recruit ...and our…

Send us a text This week Priyam Kumar shares his story of moving from a massive organisation to a startup and the challenges and growth that came from that. We discuss... 🪖 War stories and examples of production incidents 🩹 The "hacks" we build to keep things running (and how maybe that's just normal) 😎 Keeping it simple... YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna N…

Send us a text This week Michelle Casey shares her insights as a 'head of' engineering manager in the SRE context. This was one of my favourite conversations on the podcast so far. We cover topics such as... 🤷🏽 Why move into leadership? 👁️ Learning from other leaders 💎 What is unique about SRE leadership? 👑 Women in engineering leadership ...and we…

Send us a text This week Adam and I get philosophical about what constitutes maturity in the field of observability. We tackle questions such as... 💸 Does your org treat observability as a cost centre or a value add? 🔥 Are you using observability reactively to solve problems? Or proactively to build better products and services? 👤 Is your observabi…

Send us a text In this episode I explore the challenges of achieving unified observability when integrating with SaaS products and services. I cover: 🌊 The new wave of mega-complex SaaS ⚗️ Challenges integrating SaaS with our observability pipelines 👩‍🦯 How the lack of SaaS autonomy limits the effectiveness of OpenTelemetry 💰 Paying twice to ingest…

Send us a text This week I check in and give an update on work, life, and my attempts at bringing to life SRE practices in the world of non-production environment management. You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/ You can find Stephen at: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend…

Send us a text This week I'm joined by Karanveer Anand, SRE Technical Program Manager at Google to discuss blameless post-mortems. We cover: 🦅 The recent Crowdstrike outage and their public post-mortem 🚑 When do we do a blameless post-mortem? 😕 How do we do a blameless post-mortem? ✅ How do we make sure action items are followed through? 📰 The powe…

Send us a text This week Zach Michel from https://middleware.io/ and I discuss the state of OpenTelemetry and what it means to adopt it. We cover: 🌩️ Achieving observability in a SaaS world 🥫 Context propagation - the magic sauce of OTEL 🚪 The telemetry gateway concept and leveraging the OTEL collector 🪵 The state of OpenTelemetry logging 🫂 Making …

Send us a text In Episode 80 Niall Murphy talked about the need for SREs to be better at articulating the value of our work. In this episode I'm joined by ex-Googler and Engineering Director (SRE) at Culture Amp Artem Yakimenko about how we might achieve this. We discuss both quantifiable and qualitative approaches including leveraging the untapped…

Send us a text In the world of SRE we constantly talk about defining SLOs, but what about evolving them over time? This week I chat with SRE Tech Lead Dom Finn about just that. We cover the relationship between reliability and user analytics, latency classes as a way to speak SLOs with business stakeholders, the role of NFRs and how the thresholds …

Send us a text This week I talk about the impact of SaaS-first technology strategies on the work of an SRE. I pose questions about observability, ownership, on-call, and how much control we have over reliability. You can find the Bleeding Tech blog on Medium: https://medium.com/@stownshend You can find Stephen at: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com…

Send us a text This week I chat with Dan Slimmon about applying the approach doctors use to treat patient symptoms during incident response. You can find Dan's blog at https://blog.danslimmon.com/ or connect with him on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danslimmon/ You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://sl…

Send us a text This week I hear about all things Kubernetes from Komodor CTO and co-founder Itiel Shwartz. We chat about the promise that was made when Kubernetes first entered the industry, the challenge of getting developers engaged and capable of working in Kubernetes, my hate/hate relationship with Helm but its important contribution to the Kub…

Send us a text This week I sit down and have a discussion with Amin Astaneh (from Certo Modo) about CI/CD. We cover the power of the standard change as a way to navigate ITIL while still implementing DevOps practices, what to monitor to make your CI/CD observable, single piece flow, testing in production, and so much more. You can find Amin on his …

Send us a text "Environment issues are just incidents that happened to occur in a non-production environment"... so why do we treat them so differently? In this first episode of the 2024 season I reflect on how we handle incidents in non-prod environments. (Note: Had a few issues with noise suppression in OBS Studio cutting off the start of some wo…

Send us a text This week I speak with co-author of the original SRE book + the SRE workbook, and renowned speaker Niall Murphy. We chat about the state of SRE in the current macro-economic climate and how we're not yet doing a very good job at articulating the value of SRE to leaders, the relationship that velocity and reliability have, the value o…

Send us a text Paige Cruz (from Chronosphere) is back. This week we discuss sampling. What is sampling? Why do it? What kinds of sampling are there? You can check out Chronosphere's cloud native observability platform here: https://chronosphere.io/ You can find Paige on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paigerduty/ X: https://twitter.com/paige…

Send us a text This week Valeska Victoria returns to share some of her experiences working as an SRE at eBay. We look at the cascading effect of production issues in complex integrated environments (how there's often no single root cause), developer literacy of how infrastructure works, the importance of ownership and accountability of reliability,…

Send us a text This week I chat with Ankit Jain from aviator.co about developer experience. We define developer experience and developer productivity, and how this applies to SRE. We discuss the growing expectation on developers and how this leads to frustration and burnout. We also explore how to measure developer experience and how to start worki…

Send us a text A brief mid-week update on my changing circumstances and the future of the podcast.By Stephen Townshend

Send us a text This week I had the privilege of interviewing Liz Fong-Jones from honeycomb.io about DevRel, Developer Advocacy, and how that applies to SRE. We discuss the difference between Developer Relations (DevRel) and Developer Advocacy, how Liz got into advocacy, how DevRel helps companies and the community, and some tips on how to get tract…

Send us a text This week I had the honour of chatting with Steve McGhee (former Google SRE, current Google Reliability Advocate, and co-author of Enterprise Roadmap to SRE). We discuss the evolution of SRE from where it began at Google and how it is being adopted by enterprises around the world now (and why this is happening). We talk about getting…

Send us a text This week on Slight Reliability Stephen discusses observability vendor lock-in. What is it? What does OpenTelemetry do to help? What areas are yet to be solved? You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/ You can find Stephen at: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshen…

Send us a text This week we sit down and talk about SLOs with CPO and co-founder of Nobl9 Brian Singer. We talk about the importance of reviewing operational effectiveness, getting buy in from leadership, using SLOs to reduce noise, how to implement SLOs within different cultures and structures, the parallels between security and reliability... and…

Send us a text This week Stephen chats with Valeska Victoria about her time working as an SRE at eBay. Valeska shares her data driven approach to SRE, having a voice as a less experienced engineer, handling incidents under high pressure, leveraging large language models to rapidly find the information you need during an incident, and much more. You…

Send us a text This week Stephen chats with Dr. Vlad Ukis about his journey discovering, and then implementing SRE practices at Siemens Healthineers (which led to him writing a book). They discuss how the evolution of infrastructure necessitates a shift in how we operate, the power of selling SRE practices, the SRE infrastructure used to build SLOs…

Send us a text Amin Astaneh (from Certo Modo) is back to discuss his experience working as a production engineer (SRE equivalent) at Meta. Stephen and Amin discuss what it's like interviewing for big tech, "you build it, you own it", different SRE engagement models, SRE at different sizes of organisation, socialising your SRE success as a way to ge…

Send us a text This week Stephen talks to Praveen Kasam from Diconium Digital Solutions about how he led SRE transformations. Praveen shares his experience transitioning from development to SRE and how leveraging automation and bringing application knowledge to the ops team provided quick wins. He also covers how he later applied SRE concepts to up…

Send us a text This week Stephen asks Eric Schabell (Director of Technical Marketing & Evangelism @ Chronosphere) about how dashboards fit into modern observability. They discuss how untamed observability can lead to unexpectedly high cloud bills, the similarities between dashboards and documentation, the "know > triage > understand" workflow, and …

Send us a text This week Stephen chats with Jamie Allen (Cheif Technologist AWS & SRE @ EPAM Systems) and Adam Kinniburgh (VP Innovation @ SquaredUp) about the concept of a single pane of glass (SPOG) for SRE. Is it performance art or something actionable? Can alerting replace the need for dashboards? And are metrics drowning in the wake of distrib…

Send us a text This week Stephen brings back Kyle Forster from RunWhen to talk about the purple elephant in the room… “AI”. What makes it GenAI, LLM, Advanced Statistics, or ML? Kyle shares his experience surrounding building AI powered search engines for SRE troubleshooting commands and how to incorporate a (paid) open source community of experts …

Send us a text This week Stephen chats with the internet incident librarian herself, Courtney Nash. They explore what Courtney has learned through meta-analysis of the over ten thousands incidents in the Verica Open Incident Database (VOID). They cover why MTTR needs to go in the garbage, joint cognitive systems, the value of looking at near misses…

Send us a text This week Stephen chats with Martin Thwaites from Honeycomb about how developers can leverage observability to understand what they're building better, solve bugs quicker, and have more time for coding. They also discuss OpenTelemetry (the protocol and semantic conventions), manual versus automatic instrumentation, and how keeping ev…

Send us a text Observability is a necessary adaptation to make sense of software systems in the Digital Age, but how can we unlock its power for non-engineer stakeholders (such as executives, product owners, etc)? Perhaps we need a layer of abstraction sitting on top of our detailed observability to get the most out of it. You can find the official…