Site Reliability Engineering 2023 Conference

Last month, I had the incredible opportunity to attend Conf42 Site Reliability Engineering 2023 Conference!

The conference as a whole was really interesting but my highlights are:

Replacing Privileged Users With Automated Just-in-Time Access Requests by Travis Rodgers

• Managing privileged access to resources can be cumbersome, with developers often needing temporary access beyond their regular duties.
• Just-in-time access solutions allow engineers to escalate privileges when necessary, applying the principle of least privilege in a secure manner.
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Implementing RBAC further enhances security by defining and assigning roles, reducing the need for admin accounts.

Building Automated Quality Gates into your CI pipelines by Craig Risi (My favourite)

• How to incorporate automated quality checks at various stages of the CI pipeline to ensure the delivery of high-quality software.
• It highlights the benefits of having automated quality gates in place, including early bug detection and prevention.
• Practical guidance on implementing quality gates using tools and techniques such as static code analysis, code coverage analysis, and automated testing.

GPT: Revolutionizing Monitoring and Logging Systems by Clay Langston

• Use GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) to enhance logging and monitoring performance.
• Maximize log value and improve system performance.
• Automate the process by integrating with ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana).
• Construct effective prompts to extract valuable insights from logs.

Observability: one of the strongest muscles for SRE by Jhonnatan Gil Chaves

• Focus on the big picture when implementing SRE practices.
• Recognize the importance of the team and tools in SRE implementations.
• Don’t overlook the broader view of your IT components.

CICD – The SRE-DevOps Overlay by Safeer CM and Garima Bajpai

• Site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps practices have overlapping boundaries in many organizations.
• Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are essential aspects of this overlap.
• CI/CD serves as a prerequisite for many core SRE practices.

How to achieve the scalability, high availability, and elastic ability of your database infrastructure on Kubernetes by Trista Pan

• How to make the clusters scalable, elastic, and highly available.
• Traffic governance between applications and databases plays a crucial role in achieving these goals.
• Effective way to manage and distribute traffic.

Measuring Reliability in Production Ramon Medrano Llamas

• Identifying Critical User Journeys (CUJs) and recommendations for selecting appropriate metrics as SLI and SLO targets.
• Practical insights and actionable steps for implementing SLIs and SLOs in your own applications.

If you missed out on Conf42 SRE 2023, fear not! The link with the abstract of the talks, the speakers and other details is here and you can also watch below the talks on youtube 🙌