USENIX Courses

Principles of Chaos Engineering

An empirical approach to surfacing inherent chaos in distributed systems and building confidence in their resilience through structured Chaos Engineering practices.

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

Linux Systems Performance

A practical tour of Linux performance analysis and tuning using observability tools, benchmarking, profiling, tracing, and system-performance recipes.

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

Earthquakes, Forest Fires, and Your Next Production Incident

Learn how the Incident Command System evolved from emergency response into a flexible framework for managing production incidents.

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

Anatomy of a DDoS

An overview of how DDoS attacks are structured, evolve through botnets and IoT devices, and are mitigated through protection services and legislation.

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

Why Are Distributed Systems So Hard?

Why distributed systems fail, from CAP theorem and network partitions to consensus, observability, and designing operations around human limits.

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

What Happens When You Type en.wikipedia.org

An inside look at how Wikipedia’s routers, caches, queues, databases, microservices, and containers work together—and its migration from a monolith to Kubernetes.

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

Building Resilience - How to Learn More from Incidents

Learn how resilience engineering turns post-incident reviews into better questions and deeper learning about complex systems.

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

Applicable and Achievable Formal Verification

An introductory look at making formal verification practical for existing safety-critical systems, from IEC 61508 to nuclear plants and smart sensors.

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

Zero Touch Prod - Towards Safer and More Secure Production Environments

Explore Zero Touch Prod principles for safer production changes through automation, safe proxies, peer review, and audited break-glass access.

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

How to SRE When Everything's Already on Fire

A case study in applying SRE practices, incident command, and incremental repair to restore a centralized logging platform to 99.9% reliability.

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

A Systems Approach to Safety and Cybersecurity

A systems-based framework for understanding safety and cybersecurity through control, emergent properties, risk analysis, and integrated defense examples.

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

Refining Systems Data without Losing Fidelity

Use statistical sampling to scale observability data collection while preserving anomalous context and error-bounded service insights.

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

How to Do SRE When You Have No SRE

Practical, resource-conscious guidance for starting site reliability engineering when no one is dedicated to the work.

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

SLOs for Data-Intensive Services

Learn how a search engine team replaced generic availability and latency SLOs with monitoring for response accuracy, consistency, and automated service health.

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

Advanced Napkin Math - Estimating System Performance from First Principles

Estimate system performance from first principles using base rates and napkin math before building systems.

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