USENIX Courses

Getting Started with Observability Lab - Opentracing, Prometheus, and Jaeger

Hands-on lab exploring observability tools for cloud-native applications. Install and use Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger to monitor Kubernetes clusters and instrument microservices for improved troubleshooting and diagnostics.

• YouTube
• 2 hours 14 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Differences in SRE Implementations across Companies

Explore diverse SRE implementations across companies in this interactive session. Share experiences and gain insights into varied approaches to Site Reliability Engineering in different organizational contexts.

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

Why Are Distributed Systems So Hard?

Explore the challenges of distributed systems, including CAP theorem myths, network partitions, consensus algorithms, and human factors, with cat-illustrated examples.

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

Tracing, Fast and Slow - Digging into and Improving Your Web Service's Performance

Explore techniques for tracing and improving web service performance, including black & white box tracing, distributed systems tracing, and various tools to measure and enhance service efficiency.

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

Shipping Software with an SRE Mindset

Explore how SRE techniques can be applied to on-premise software delivery, enhancing construction, packaging, and shipment processes for improved reliability and customer satisfaction.

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

Lightning Talks

Lightning talks on diverse SRE topics: incident response, distributed systems, resource management, automation, operational maturity, and monitoring. Insights from industry experts on improving reliability and efficiency.

• YouTube
• 1 hour 9 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Fault Tree Analysis Applied to Apache Kafka

Explore fault tree analysis techniques to enhance Apache Kafka cluster resilience, drawing insights from Lyft's experience in bulletproofing their deployments.

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

Latency SLOs Done Right

Explore correct approaches to calculating latency SLOs using histograms and mathematically accurate quantiles, improving service level objectives for more effective monitoring and performance management.

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

OpenEC - Toward Unified and Configurable Erasure Coding Management in Distributed Storage Systems

Unified framework for deploying erasure coding solutions in distributed storage systems, simplifying integration and optimizing repair performance.

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

Orion - A Distributed File System for Non-Volatile Main Memory and RDMA-Capable Networks

Explores a novel distributed file system design optimized for non-volatile main memory and RDMA networks, achieving high performance for metadata and data access while maintaining byte addressability.

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

Blink - Fast Connectivity Recovery Entirely in the Data Plane

Explores programmable switches for rapid rerouting using TCP-induced signals to detect failures. Presents Blink, a data-driven system analyzing TCP flows at line rate to quickly recover connectivity in the data plane.

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

Size-Aware Sharding for Improving Tail Latencies in In-Memory Key-Value Stores

Innovative size-aware sharding technique for in-memory key-value stores, reducing tail latencies and improving throughput by avoiding head-of-line blocking and optimizing request distribution across cores.

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

BLAS-on-Flash - An Efficient Alternative for Large Scale ML Training and Inference

Efficient alternative for large-scale ML tasks using SSD-resident matrices, enabling near in-memory performance on a single workstation. Outperforms distributed systems for complex algorithms like eigensolvers.

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

Chaos Engineering

Explore Netflix's approach to chaos engineering, its impact on system resilience, and lessons learned in building a robust software stack through controlled failure experiments.

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

Debugging Linux Issues with eBPF

Explore eBPF for debugging Linux performance issues, focusing on a real-world case of CPU increase in Kafka after a Debian upgrade. Learn tools and techniques for operational engineers.

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