USENIX Courses

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

Creating a Code Review Culture

Explore best practices for implementing and improving code review processes, focusing on organizational culture, author communication, and reviewer strategies for high-quality software development.

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

Keeping the Balance - Internet-Scale Load Balancing Demystified

Comprehensive overview of load balancing techniques across network layers, exploring technologies and tradeoffs for fast, reliable multi-region services at Internet scale.

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

Zero to SRE

Transforming junior engineers into SREs: creating a supportive environment, fostering a 'Culture of Error', encouraging mentorship, and prioritizing skill development for successful transitions and career growth.

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

SRE Classroom - How to Design a Distributed System in 3 Hours

Interactive workshop on designing distributed systems, covering scaling, failure handling, reliability, and consistency. Participants apply concepts to real-world scenarios using cloud components.

• YouTube
• 1 hour 3 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

What Breaks Our Systems - A Taxonomy of Black Swans

Explore categories of unforeseen, catastrophic system failures and strategies to fortify against them, including capacity testing, incident management, and communication.

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

Testing in Production at Scale

Explore real-world insights on implementing testing in production for large-scale microservices, focusing on architecture, capacity planning, and infrastructure components.

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

The Curse of SRE Autonomy and How to Manage It

Explores challenges of SRE autonomy, tool diversity, and development duplication. Presents solutions using a widely-adopted internal tool's history, addressing selection autonomy and automation strategies.

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

Complexity - The Crucial Ingredient in Your Kitchen

Explore how software engineering can learn from NASA's Challenger incident, drawing parallels to modern reliability challenges and navigating complexity in system architecture.

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

Capacity Prediction in External Services

Learn to predict resource exhaustion in external systems using linear regression, enabling proactive planning and sizing for improved application performance.

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