

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

Aug 15, 2023 • 9min
Slight Reliability Episode 63 - The Power of Summary
Send us a textObservability 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 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

Aug 1, 2023 • 37min
Slight Reliability Episode 62 - On-Call with Matt Brown
Send us a textThis week Stephen chats with former-Google SRE Matt Brown about being on-call. They cover how to up-lift junior engineers so they can be on-call, what a fair on-call schedule looks like, run-books, and much more.As you heard, Matt believes flexibility is key to a healthy on-call rotation. Matt is exploring ideas for improvements to existing tooling and products in this space and would love to hear from as many listeners as possible with feedback on what they find useful or frustrating with the existing tools they use to support on-call in their teams. You can reach him at oncall-feedback@mkmba.nz or schedule a chat via https://zcal.co/mattb/oncall, please don't be shy!You can also find Matt at:Website: https://www.mattb.nz/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbrown/Mastodon: https://mastodon.nz/@mattbTwitter: https://twitter.com/xleemYou 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

Jul 25, 2023 • 6min
Slight Reliability Episode 61 - SRE VS DevOps VS Platform Eng... (Yawn)
Send us a textThe internet is full of people who want to tell you about SRE, DevOps, and Platform Engineering and how different and similar they are... and will give you the impression that these things compete with each other. But do they? And is it a helpful question to ask in the first place?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

Jul 11, 2023 • 43min
Slight Reliability Episode 60 - From Zero to SRE with Amin Astaneh
Send us a textIn this episode Amin Astaneh from Certo Modo discusses his experience undertaking an SRE transformation over several years.Stephen and Amin cover a lot of ground including making ops work visible, measuring toil, the power of calculating the $ value of work, getting developers on-call, the embedded model for SRE, SLOs, culture change, and a whole lot more.You can find Amin on his company website https://certomodo.io, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aminastaneh/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/aastanehThe books Amin mentions are...The Practice of Cloud System Administration: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/practice-of-cloud/9780133478549/The Phoenix Project: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-phoenix-project/9781457191350/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_sreInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

Jul 4, 2023 • 40min
Slight Reliability Episode 59 - Bad API Observability with Sonja Chevre
Send us a textIn this episode Stephen Townshend and Sonja Chevre from Tyk discuss making APIs observable, and some anti-patterns to avoid. They cover GraphQL, OpenTelemetry and semantic conventions, correlation IDs, observability pipelines, and much more.You can find Sonja on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonjachevre/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/SonjaChevreYou can listen to Sonja's KubeCon talk here: https://youtu.be/IkEUJjRBCboYou can find Tyk's open source gateway here: https://github.com/TykTechnologies/tykYou 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_sreInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

Jun 27, 2023 • 37min
Slight Reliability Episode 58 - Tackling Cloud Cost with Harinder Seera
Harinder Seera, cloud cost management expert, joins Stephen Townshend to discuss the importance of monitoring and managing cloud cost. They explore the prevalence and factors of cloud cost, common anti-patterns in cost optimization, utilizing cloud resources and infrastructure as code, the cultural practice of FinOps, and the importance of monitoring and analyzing cloud costs with various tools and strategies.

Jun 20, 2023 • 16min
Slight Reliability Episode 57 - A Tale of Three Conferences
Send us a textIn this episode Stephen shares his experiences traveling overseas to the UK and Singapore AWS Summit, SREcon APAC, and the internal SquaredUp conference "SqUpCon".You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/You can find Slight Reliability artwork on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/You can find Stephen at:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sreInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

Jun 9, 2023 • 2min
June 9th 2023 Update
Send us a textA quick update on Stephen's whereabouts and when the next episode will be released.

May 23, 2023 • 14min
Slight Reliability Episode 56 - Dashbored
Send us a textIn this episode Stephen discusses the role of dashboards within the context of the Digital Era. What are they *not* appropriate for? What can they help with? What kinds of things are suitable to present?If you want to get involved in the SquaredUp dashboard competition head along to: https://squaredup.com/blog/dashboard-competition/ (everyone who submits an entry gets a t-shirt, you can also win Star Wars Lego, get video interviewed by me, and have the story of your dashboard presented both as a blog and on our Dashboard Gallery).You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/You can find Slight Reliability artwork on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/You can find Stephen at:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sreInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

May 16, 2023 • 40min
Slight Reliability Episode 55 - Reflections on KubeCon with Bruce Cullen
Send us a textThis week Bruce Cullen is back to share his experiences from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2023 Europe. We chat about OpenTelemetry, green engineering, securing your CI/CD pipeline and much more.Bruce is the Director of Engineering at SquaredUp. You can find him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruce-cullen/You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/If you like Slight Reliability's mspaint style artwork you can find more of it on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/You can find Stephen at:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre