USENIX Courses

Building a Billion User Load Balancer

Discover Facebook's innovative load balancing techniques for handling over 1.3 billion users, improving performance, managing capacity, and enhancing reliability across global infrastructure.

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

Scaling Shopify's Multi-Tenant Architecture across Multiple Datacenters

Explore Shopify's journey from a single-database Rails app to a multi-datacenter setup, focusing on scalability, resiliency, and disaster recovery strategies for multi-tenant architectures.

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

Doorman - Global Distributed Client Side Rate Limiting

Explore Google's Doorman system for global distributed client-side rate limiting, coordinating resource usage across multiple clients to prevent capacity overload.

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

Food for Thought - What Restaurants Can Teach Us about Reliability

Explore how restaurant operations parallel computer system reliability, drawing insights from dining experiences to enhance understanding of complex system management and fault tolerance.

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

Cache for Cash - Speeding Up Production with Kafka and MySQL binlog

Optimize high-scale production systems with Kafka and MySQL binlog for fresh, fast data distribution. Learn to balance caching tradeoffs and improve performance across thousands of services.

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

Taking Control of Metrics Growth and Cardinality - Tips for Maximizing Your Observability

Strategies for managing metrics growth and cardinality in cloud-native environments, focusing on best practices, KPIs, and team collaboration to enhance observability and streamline remediation processes.

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

Beyond Goldilocks Reliability

Explore reliability engineering beyond traditional SRE practices. Learn about concrete models, underlying mechanisms, and new strategies to enhance service reliability and tackle complex challenges.

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

Hard Problems We Handle in Incidents but Aren't Recognized

Exploring hidden challenges in incident management, including diagnostic work, coordination costs, and decision-making dilemmas, with insights for improved recognition and handling.

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

Nine Questions to Build Great Infrastructure Automation Pipelines

Explore nine key questions for building effective infrastructure automation pipelines, focusing on modular design, intent-driven approaches, and seamless tool integration for continuous delivery.

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

Automating Performance Tuning with Machine Learning

Explore machine learning-driven automation for optimizing Kubernetes microservices and JVM settings, enhancing performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness in complex tech stacks.

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

Learning More from Complex Systems

Explore complex systems' traits and learn better approaches to incident analysis beyond linear root-cause methods. Gain insights from history, science, and philosophy to enhance understanding of resilience in modern organizations.

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

Evolution of Incident Management at Slack

Explore Slack's evolution in incident management, covering strategies for handling numerous incidents, team-wide capability building, and future directions in maintaining platform reliability.

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

Demystifying Machine Learning in Production - Reasoning about a Large-Scale ML Platform

Explore techniques for managing and improving reliability in large-scale machine learning production systems, focusing on common failure modes, best practices, and practical strategies for SREs.

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

From 15,000 Database Connections to Under 100 - A Tech Debt Tale

Explore a multi-year tech debt resolution journey, focusing on reducing database connections from 15,000 to under 100. Learn strategies for handling scaling challenges in distributed systems.

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

Let's Bring System Dynamics Back to CS

Explore System Dynamics for modeling feedback loops in distributed systems. Learn its history, tools, and applications to prevent outages and improve software architecture design.

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