

Slight Reliability
Stephen Townshend
Learning SRE, one day at a time.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Feb 13, 2024 • 26min
Slight Reliability Episode 82 - CI/CD with Amin Astaneh
Send us a textThis 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 company website https://certomodo.io, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aminastaneh/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/aastanehYou can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/You can find Stephen at:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sreYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliabilityInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sreThis episode was sponsored by SquaredUp. SquaredUp combines all your data with awesome dashboards, analytics, health rollup, and notifications, into a unified observability portal. Using a data mesh architecture, SquaredUp is a beautifully simple way to get instant access to the insights that matter, whenever you need them. If you want to know more head over to https://squaredup.com/ to sign up for your free account.

Feb 6, 2024 • 10min
Slight Reliability Episode 81 - Incident Management in Non-Prod Environments
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 words, will sort it for the next episode)You can find Stephen at:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sreYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliabilityInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

Nov 22, 2023 • 37min
Slight Reliability Episode 80 - What's Been Bugging Niall Murphy
Send us a textThis 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 of new features versus reliability improvements, and *much* more.You can find Niall at:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niallm/X: https://twitter.com/niallmWebsite: https://relyabilit.ie/(and his company Stanza: https://www.stanza.systems/)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/X: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sreInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

Nov 21, 2023 • 45min
Slight Reliability Episode 76 - Sampling Distributed Traces with Paige Cruz
Send us a textPaige 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/paigerdutyYou can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/You can find Stephen at:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/X: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sreInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

Nov 20, 2023 • 38min
Slight Reliability Episode 79 - Incident Story Time with Valeska Victoria
Send us a textThis 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, and much more.You can find Valeska on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valeska-victoria/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/X: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sreInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

Nov 16, 2023 • 32min
Slight Reliability Episode 78 - Developer Experience with Ankit Jain
Send us a textThis 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 working to make improvements.You can check out Aviator's developer experience platform here: https://www.aviator.co/You can find Ankit on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankitjaindce/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/X: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sreInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

Nov 16, 2023 • 5min
December 2023 Update
Send us a textA brief mid-week update on my changing circumstances and the future of the podcast.

Nov 15, 2023 • 32min
Slight Reliability Episode 77 - SRE to DevRel with Liz Fong-Jones
Send us a textThis 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 traction with SRE practices in your organisation.You can check out Honeycomb's observability platform here: https://www.honeycomb.io/You can find Liz on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/efong/Website: https://www.lizthegrey.com/ (all her social/links are here)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/X: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sreInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

Nov 14, 2023 • 39min
Slight Reliability Episode 75 - Enterprise SRE with Steve McGhee
Send us a textThis 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 leadership support and how we get reliability taken seriously, the lies we tell ourselves to justify incidents and issues, leveraging transformation projects to bring SRE to life, how SLOs can act as the fulcrum between dev and ops, the fallacy of the pyramid model of reliability... and so much more.You can find Steve at on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemcghee/X: https://twitter.com/stevemcgheeYou can find Steve's book "Enterprise Roadmap to SRE" here: https://sre.google/resources/practices-and-processes/enterprise-roadmap-to-sre/Steve also mentions the book "A Seat at the Table": https://itrevolution.com/product/a-seat-at-the-table/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/X: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sreInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

Oct 31, 2023 • 9min
Slight Reliability Episode 74 - The Hidden Side of Vendor Lock-In
Send us a textThis 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/stephentownshend/Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sreYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliabilityInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre