USENIX Courses

Build vs. Buy: Evaluating Incident Management Tools During Team Downsizing

Explore a small SRE team's journey in revamping their incident tool amid downsizing and increased workload, leading to a critical "build vs. buy" decision and cultural shift in improving platform reliability.

• YouTube
• 32 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

99.99% of Your Traces Are Probably Trash - Managing Distributed Tracing Data

Explore distributed tracing challenges, focusing on data volume management through sampling techniques. Learn about OpenTelemetry configurations and their impact on cost and value of tracing data.

• YouTube
• 35 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

System Performance and Queuing Theory - Concepts and Application

Explore queueing theory basics and its application to software systems. Learn to configure systems, predict performance, and identify breaking points using real-world data and metrics.

• YouTube
• 40 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

What Can You See from Here? - Gaining Perspective in SRE

Explore how perspective shapes your work, priorities, and potential. Learn to broaden your view for enhanced decision-making, influence, and personal growth in the tech industry.

• YouTube
• 49 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

Automating Disaster Recovery: The Ultimate Reliability Challenge

Explore the journey of automating disaster recovery, from initial skepticism to successful implementation. Learn how a sociotechnical approach can lead to unexpected breakthroughs in system reliability.

• YouTube
• 25 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

It Is OK to Be Metastable - Mitigating Risks in Large Systems

Explore strategies to mitigate metastable failures in large systems, focusing on understanding environments, trigger-resistant design, and protecting vulnerable components.

• YouTube
• 38 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

Thawing the Great Code Slush - Restoring Productivity Without Compromising Reliability

Discover how Slack's infrastructure team overcame a restrictive code review process, restoring productivity without compromising reliability. Learn strategies for building trust and making effective compromises.

• YouTube
• 38 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

Frontend Design in SRE - Key Aspects for User Experience

Explore key aspects of designing user-friendly SRE tools as companies grow, shifting from scrappy solutions to deliberate UX approaches for broader accessibility.

• YouTube
• 17 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

The Sins of High Cardinality in Observability Metrics Collection

Strategies to manage high cardinality in observability metrics, balancing granularity with resource constraints. Explores Prometheus examples to optimize data collection and query performance.

• YouTube
• 20 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

Patching Your Way to Compliance with a Small Team and Technical Debt

Learn strategies to overcome system patching challenges with limited resources, focusing on breaking the cycle of technical debt and meeting security compliance requirements.

• YouTube
• 18 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

OIDC and CI/CD: Reducing Security Threats in Your CI Pipeline

Explore CI/CD security risks and learn strategies to reduce attack surfaces using OIDC, proper branch permissions, and credential management for enhanced supply chain protection.

• YouTube
• 17 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

From Chaos to Clarity: Deciphering Cache Inconsistencies in a Distributed Environment

Explore Netflix's distributed caching system, its replication engine processing 30M requests/second, and a critical debugging journey that nearly delayed a global launch. Learn applicable techniques for any organization.

• YouTube
• 15 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

Optimizing Resilience and Availability by Migrating from JupyterHub to Kubeflow Notebook Controller

Explore the migration from JupyterHub to Kubeflow Notebook Controller, highlighting improved resilience, scalability, and user satisfaction in Kubernetes-native architecture.

• YouTube
• 19 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

Measuring Reliability Culture to Optimize Tradeoffs - Perspectives from an Anthropologist

Explore how culture impacts engineering practices at Meta, focusing on measuring and optimizing reliability culture to balance speed with stability in infrastructure development.

• YouTube
• 18 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video

Migrating a Large Scale Search Dataset in Production for High Availability - SREcon24 Americas

Discover how Shopify migrated European merchants' search data to address latency and GDPR issues, overcoming challenges to ensure uninterrupted service and maintain revenue for their clients.

• YouTube
• 20 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Free Video