USENIX Courses

Implementing Distributed Consensus

Explore distributed consensus through "Skinny," a lock service. Learn Paxos protocol, design a simple consensus protocol, and tackle implementation challenges from theory to coding.

• YouTube
• 48 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Tuning Java's G1 Garbage Collector for Realtime Services

Explore Java's G1 Garbage Collector tuning for realtime services, focusing on performance measurement, latency optimization, and effective settings for large heaps.

• YouTube
• 25 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

A Tale of Two Postmortems - A Human Factors View

Explore the contrast between Safety I and Safety II approaches in incident reviews, using a fictional company's experience to demonstrate more effective postmortem practices for improved system reliability.

• YouTube
• 30 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

How We Used Kafka to Scale Database Infrastructure

Explore LinkedIn's NoSQL database scaling journey, from MySQL replication challenges to Kafka-based solutions, offering insights on reliable data delivery and infrastructure optimization.

• YouTube
• 54 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

How to Trade off Server Utilization and Tail Latency

Explore the trade-offs between server utilization and tail latency in large-scale systems. Learn queueing theory basics, analyze typical outcomes, and gain practical insights for optimizing system performance.

• YouTube
• 28 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Let's Build a Distributed File System

Explore the architecture of typical and distributed file systems, including key components and operations. Learn through a simple Python implementation of a basic distributed file system.

• YouTube
• 53 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

TCP - Architecture, Enhancements, and Tuning

Comprehensive exploration of TCP architecture, enhancements, and tuning, covering core concepts, connection establishment, flow control, congestion avoidance, and performance optimization techniques for network engineers.

• YouTube
• 50 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Operating Elasticsearch with Ease at Scale

Discover strategies for operating Elasticsearch at scale, covering common issues, optimization techniques, and best practices for handling massive deployments with billions of ingests and millions of searches daily.

• YouTube
• 56 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Yes, No, Maybe? Error Handling with gRPC Examples

Explore error handling in gRPC with practical examples, focusing on client-server discrepancies and effective code snippets for managing various response scenarios.

• YouTube
• 33 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Latency SLOs Done Right

Explore three approaches to accurately calculate latency SLOs using histograms for correct quantiles. Learn to frame SLOs effectively for improved service level management and monitoring.

• YouTube
• 50 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Aperture - A Non-Cooperative, Client-Side Load Balancing Algorithm

Explore Twitter's Aperture algorithm for client-side load balancing, addressing scalability challenges in large service clusters and improving RPC framework efficiency.

• YouTube
• 41 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Sublinear Scaling in Practice - The 1k SRE Project

Explore Google's SRE team's approach to sublinear scaling, automation, and cultural shifts for managing 1000+ services efficiently without increasing staff.

• YouTube
• 27 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Designing Resilient Data Pipelines

Strategies for resilient data pipelines: observability, immutable inputs, declarative pipelines, and data validation. Reduce operational complexity, update risks, and accuracy concerns in complex systems.

• YouTube
• 30 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Pragmatic Automation

Explore pragmatic automation strategies for reducing toil in cloud operations, drawing insights from a large public cloud provider's experiences and applicable to various work environments.

• YouTube
• 25 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Tackling Kafka with a Small Team

Explore scaling Kafka with limited resources, covering challenges, failures, and tactical approaches for managing complex distributed systems in a fast-growing business environment.

• YouTube
• 28 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk