S.R.E.path Podcast

May 14 2024 3

S.R.E.path Podcast artwork

Most advice on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is by BigTech for BigTech. SREpath's more realistic approach helps you make SRE work in a "normal" organization. Join your hosts, Ash Patel and Sebastian Vietz, as we demystify SRE jargon, interview experts, and share practical insights. Our mission is to help you boost your SRE efforts to succeed in areas like observability, incident response, release engineering, and more. We're reliability-focused professionals from companies where software is critical, but is not the product itself.

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#41 Curbing High Observability Costs

May 14 2024 24 mins

No one wants to get Coinbase’s $65 million observability bill in the future. Sure, observability comes with a necessary cost. But that cost cannot exceed the concrete and perceived value on balance sheets and the minds of leaders. Sofia Fosdick shares practical insights on curbing high observability costs. She’s a senior account executive at Honeycomb.io and has held similar ti

#40 How to Enable Observability for Success

May 07 2024 27 mins

Observability is more than a set of technologies. It’s a practice. Timothy Mahoney is no stranger to this practice, enabling many developer teams to take on better practices in observability. He’s a senior systems engineer at IKEA and is part of its observability enabling team. Tim highlighted the importance of developing and driving frameworks for observability. He also covere

#39 How Chaos Engineering Helps Reduce Incident Risk

Apr 30 2024 24 mins

Chaos Engineering is no longer a nice to have, as Ananth Movva explains in this episode of the SREpath podcast. His experiences with it drove a reduced number and severity of serious incidents and outages.He’s been at the helm of reliability-focused decision-making at one of Canada’s largest banks, BMO, since 2020. Having completed 12 years at the bank, Ananth has seen the evol

#38 The Real Cost of Software Reliability & Downtime

Apr 23 2024 23 mins

This episode covers Chapter 3 of the Site Reliability Engineering book (2016). In this second part, we talk about the costs behind reliability and choosing not to do it well or at all.Here are key takeaways from our conversation:* Prioritize Risk Mitigation: Recognize SRE as a discipline focused on mitigating risks within your organization, including technology, reputation, and fin

#37 An SRE Approach to Managing Technology Risk

Apr 16 2024 30 mins

This episode covers Chapter 3 of the Site Reliability Engineering book (2016). In this first part, we talk about embracing risk from the SRE perspective. We'll cover how it's very different to the typical IT risk management mindset. Here are key takeaways from our conversation: Embrace Risk with Velocity: Rather than being hindered by traditional governance models and chan

#36 Avoiding Critical Platform Engineering Mistakes

Apr 09 2024 26 mins

Platform engineering is replacing SRE and DevOps. Jokes aside, knowing the path to better platforms is key. Abby Bangser is the right person to tell us how to achieve greater maturity in this aspect of software operations. She's previously held SRE roles and currently works as Principal Engineer at Syntasso, the company behind the popular Kratix platform framework. Abby highlig

#35 Boosting Your Observability Data's Usability

Apr 02 2024 35 mins

The observability (o11y) data revolution is well underway, but are we getting the most from the data that is being collected?Richard Benwell thinks we have room for improvement, especially at the usage stage where we query and visualize the o11y data.He is the founder and CEO of SquaredUp, a dashboard software company based out of Maidenhead, UK with over 10 years of experience in

#34 From Cloud to Concrete: Should You Return to On-Prem?

Mar 26 2024 22 mins

This episode continues our coverage of Chapter 2 of the Site Reliability Engineering book (2016). We talk about the age-old debate of cloud vs on-prem, which is analogous to that other debate we have in the technology of build vs buy. Here are key takeaways from our conversation: Adapt your storage solutions to business needs: Understand the diverse storage options available and t

#33 Inside Google's Data Center Design

Mar 19 2024 23 mins

This episode covers Chapter 2 of the Site Reliability Engineering book (2016). In this first part, we talk about the intricacies of data center design outlined in the book. One thing is for sure. Building a data center for your own needs is HARD work with many considerations you must make.Here are key takeaways from our conversation: Importance of understanding data center fundame

#32 Clarifying Platform Engineering's Role (with Ajay Chankramath) BONUS EP

Mar 14 2024 16 mins

Will Platform Engineering replace DevOps or SRE or both? I don’t think this is the case at all. Neither does Ajay Chankramath.He is the Head of Platform Engineering at ThoughtWorks North America, an innovator consulting group. I’d take his word for it since he’s held senior leadership roles in release engineering and more since 2002.In this bonus episode of the SREpath podcas