USENIX Courses

The Secret Lives of SREs - Controlling the Costs of Coordination across Remote Teams

Exploring hidden complexities in SRE incident response, revealing surprising findings on coordination strategies, tooling impacts, and adaptive choreography in managing service outages.

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

Identifying Hidden Dependencies

Discover how Honeycomb improved system reliability through intentional node termination, uncovering bugs and progressing towards continuous experimentation for enhanced resilience and scalability.

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

Continuously Improving Culture through Design Decisions

Explore how technical decisions shape DevOps culture, focusing on Two Sigma's COIN platform. Learn strategies for fostering collaboration, innovation, and community in tech environments.

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

Avoiding Goodhart's Law - Use SLOs as Tools Not Cudgels

Explore how to effectively use SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets as tools for balanced risk management and productive conversations, rather than punitive measures in SRE practices.

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

Give Your PXE Wings - Bootstrapping Explained

Demystifying system bootstrapping: explore PXE, multi-stage processes, and automation techniques for faster, simpler, and more reliable IT provisioning and day-two operations.

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

It's a Trap! How Abstractions Have Failed Us

Explores how excessive abstraction in tech can lead to complexity, loss of foundational knowledge, and disconnection from original problems. Offers insights on balancing abstraction with practicality.

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

Automatically Detect the Top Performance & Scalability Issues in Distributed Architectures

Explore common performance patterns in distributed systems and learn automated detection techniques using CNCF's Keptn project for CI/CD pipelines, focusing on SLI/SLO-based quality gates.

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

Implementing Distributed Consensus

Explore distributed consensus through "Skinny," a lock service. Learn Paxos protocol, design a simple consensus protocol, and tackle implementation challenges in distributed systems.

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

Challenges of Starting an SRE Team from Scratch in an Enterprise

Insights on building an SRE team in a large enterprise, addressing challenges, establishing standards, and focusing on business priorities like security and cloud cost control.

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

When - Bin - Sh Attacks - Revisiting Automate All the Things

Explores challenges and impacts of pervasive automation in SRE, discussing human factors, potential harm, and strategies for effective implementation in complex socio-technical systems.

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

The Smallest Possible SRE Team

Strategies for maximizing SRE impact with limited resources. Learn to leverage data, tools, and communication for effective small-scale SRE implementation and organizational influence.

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

Confessions of a Systems Engineer - Learning from My 20+ Years of Failure

Veteran systems engineer shares invaluable lessons from two decades of failures, offering insights on designing, running, and troubleshooting large-scale online services to help others avoid costly mistakes.

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

Achieving Mutual TLS - Secure Pod-to-Pod Communication Without the Hassle

Explore secure pod-to-pod communication using Mutual TLS, focusing on certificate management, implementation in Golang and Java applications, and integration with Kubernetes for streamlined security.

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

Theseus - An Experiment in Operating System Structure and State Management

Redesigning OS modularity using Rust, Theseus reduces inter-component state dependencies, enabling live evolution and fault recovery for core components beyond existing systems.

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

RedLeaf - Isolation and Communication in a Safe Operating System

Explore RedLeaf, a Rust-based OS leveraging language safety for fine-grained isolation. Learn about innovative approaches to fault isolation, driver recovery, and performance in operating system design.

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