Notes on SREcon EMEA Dublin 2023 2023

Key Takeaways

MLOps: Focus on monitoring outputs and user impact.
Monitoring/SLOs: Utilize histograms for better analysis.
SLOs: Maintain a balance between reliability, on-call health, and productivity with SLOs.
Automation as a Team Player:
- Ensure automation processes are predictable and transparent.
- Avoid creating surprises with automation and maintain simplicity.
FinOps: Use tools like OpenCost/Kubecost to analyze and optimize cloud resource usage.
Profiling: Utilize tools like Parca for continuous profiling and analysis.

Looking at your average latency is like looking at the average temperature in the hospital.

"Percentage availability" is for tourists.

Instrument first, ask questions later.

Try to build amplifiers and not prostheses.

Liz Rice's keynote highlighted the significance of eBPF technology.
Symptom-based alerting for machine learning emphasized monitoring outputs, user impact, and input data distribution. Resources include a Google research paper and various metrics for monitoring ML systems.
Reliability-enhancing procedures included steps such as service definition, SLOs, and operational response testing.
Understanding QUIC vs HTTP/3 and its application mapping was also discussed, providing a GitHub resource for further exploration.
Deploying and debugging HTTP/3 was briefly touched upon.

SRE principles applied to cybersecurity highlighted the importance of SLOs for security.
The significance of distributed tracing and the importance of statistics for engineers were discussed. Resources included explanations on histograms and SLO measurement tools.
Incidents as a means to enhance reliability investment were emphasized, focusing on mapping system capabilities and understanding user context.

Various talks covered topics such as OTel implementation, open-source observability, continuous profiling, Prometheus histograms, accountability engineering, and FinOps.
The importance of automation being a good team player was stressed, citing the "Ironies of Automation" paper and the need to avoid creating surprises with automation.