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© 2025 Slight Reliability
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Learning SRE, one day at a time.
115 Episodes
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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 company website https://certomodo.io, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aminastaneh/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/aastaneh You can find t...
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://twitt...
Send us a text From the day we invented computers we've been struggling to keep applications running and delivering services to the business. Is this latest wave of AI helping or hurting us? This week I'm joined by Causely CEO and founder Shmuel Kliger to dive into... 🌊 The three waves of AI hype over the decades (the history of AI) ☠️ The dangers of over-promising and under-delivering what AI can do 🧠 What is causal reasoning? 😱 Is AI replacing SREs? 🔮 AI as a way to allow humans to solve hi...
Send us a text What is operational intelligence and how is it different from observability or BI? This week I'm joined by SquaredUp's VP of Innovation Adam Kinniburgh to answer that question and many more including... ❓ What is operational intelligence? 🙈 Relating observability back to customer, business, or revenue 😎 The value of giving stakeholders confidence 🌉 Who bridges the gap between tech and business or engineers and leadership? 🦋 Correlation VS causation and our innate desire to buil...
Send us a text How does leading platform teams differ from leading product teams? This week I'm joined by experienced technology leader Dinesh Sukhija to answer that question and many more including... ❓ What is a platform team? ⚽ Coaching engineers to focus on outcomes ☀️ Connecting platform initiatives to business goals ✋ Identifying the limiters in your team 🎤 Spreading knowledge and avoiding single points of failure ...and much more. You can find Dinesh on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin....
Send us a text How has my first two years as a manager in tech been? What have I learned? What do I need to work on? This week I share my experiences over the past couple of years. I cover: 🔥 My recent close call with burnout 🫶 How I attempted to build a team culture 💪 The importance of tough conversations 🥱 How roles and responsibilities might be boring to think about but is critical ❓ What's next? ...and much more. You can find me on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ ...
Send us a text How could AI help human beings negotiate the mountains of telemetry we collect to get simple and fast insight? This week I'm joined by Ottermon AI CEO and founder Checo Pacheco about the lifecycle of observability coverage and tooling within organisations and how AI is helping to find signals amongst the noise and reduce cognitive load for SREs. We discuss... 🎂 The need for a layer of logic on top of our telemetry data 🚲 The observability lifecycle of a DevOps team 🎶 How most o...
Send us a text What is chaos engineering and how is it being used in 2025? This week I'm joined by Gremlin CEO and founder Kolton Andrus to discuss... 🌪️ What is chaos engineering and what is its origins? 🪴 How has it evolved over the year? 🤖 The role of AI agents in SRE work 💰 Justifying the value of chaos engineering 🏃♀️➡️ How do I get started? ...and much more. You can find Kolton on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kolton-andrus-77315a2/ And you can find out more about Gremlin's n...
Send us a text What are Team Topologies? How can they be used to deliver value simpler and more effectively (and in a more humane way)? This week I'm joined by Luke McManus to discuss... ⛰️ What are the four team topologies? 🏆 Can we have too much collaboration? ⌚ Team interaction models 🌏 Cognitive load 🏃♀️➡️ Value dynamics mapping ...and much more. You can find Luke on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-mcmanus-agile/ Check out the recently released second edition of the Team Top...
Send us a text How do you begin contributing to an open source project? What's it like? What do you get out of it? This week I'm joined by Wendy Ha who shares her unique story of joining the Kubernetes project and becoming a contributor. We explore... ⛰️ What it's like working on one of the biggest open source projects in the world 🏆 The benefits of contributing to open source ⌚ How much time and effort does it take? 🌏 The unique challenges of contributing from APAC (and the need for more con...
Send us a text As an #SRE how do you influence senior leadership to get support and priority for the things you care about? To answer this question I'm joined by Nora Jones, founder of Jeli and now Head of Pricing, Product Strategy and Growth at PagerDuty. Our conversation touches on... 🤝 How understanding needs to flow both ways (between engineers and leaders) 🎨 Reliability is as much an art as a science 📝 Using napkin math to start conversations 🧠 Understand the system (your org) before try...
Send us a text This week I do a retrospective on the Slight Reliability podcast. 👂 How many people listen to it? ❤️ How do I feel about the show? 🎉 What's going well? 🪴 What could be better? ❔ What's next for the show? If you want to check out the podcast that came before Slight Reliability, you can find Performance Time archived on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@performance-time You can find Stephen on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app...
Send us a text Have you burned out at work? What was your experience? How did you work through it? This week I'm joined by the incredible Colette Alexander to discuss what burnout is, what it means, and we both share our personal experiences burning out at work. We cover... 🔥 What is burnout? ❓ Why does it happen? 🫀 What are the symptoms? 🥊 Fight, flight, or freeze 🧑🚒 Advice on how to recover ...and much more. Resources from the show... Why you're so angry at work (and what to do about it) b...
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 mobile observability ✅ Advice on how to get started with mobile observability ...and much more. You can find Hanson on: LinkedIn: https://www.link...
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 concepts for resilience (paper) by Dr. David Woods https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276139783_Four_concepts_for_resilience_and_the_implication...
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 incentivise to avoid incidents (it doesn't work that way) ❤️🩹 You can't understand how something is broken unless you know how it's supposed to work i...
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 🧑🍼 Focusing on what matters (customer & business > technology) 👀 Not just adding more monitoring as the output of each PIR 😎 How autonomy can lead to...
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 blameless, people will hide things 🌳 Alternative approaches to root cause analysis such as branching timelines 🙋 Getting someone without skin in the ga...
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 can find David on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-dick/ You can find more about 2 Steps at https://2steps.io/# You can find Stephen on: ...
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 you're not an expert in what they do ...and much more. Resources mentioned during the episode: Turn The Ship Around! (book): https://davidmarquet.com...
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