USENIX Courses

Take Me Down to the Paradise City Where the Metric Is Green and Traces Are Pretty

Explore OpenTelemetry for cloud-native observability, with Java and Go examples showing how to produce traces and metrics through its APIs.

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

Cache Strategies with Best Practices

A technical deep dive into cache strategies for faster, more efficient, and more available data-intensive services.

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

A Political Scientist's View on Site Reliability

A political science lens on site reliability, team dynamics, self-organizing systems, and complexity in software engineering.

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

When Linux Memory Accounting Goes Wrong

Debug Linux host outages caused by inaccurate cgroup memory accounting, using a real-world incident to trace, validate, and mitigate the failure.

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

Don't Follow Leaders or - All Models Are Wrong - and So Am I

A critical five-year retrospective on the SRE book, examining its models, assumptions, legacy, reliability practices, safety culture, and ethics.

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

The Cornerstone for Cybersecurity - Cryptographic Standards

An overview of NIST cryptographic standards, their validation and transition, and emerging post-quantum and lightweight cryptography challenges.

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

Why You Should Burn Down Your Datacenter

Explore integrating datacenter power, space, cooling, and industrial control systems with infrastructure management—and the complexity this creates.

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

Can Infrastructure as Code Apply to Bare Metal?

Applying Infrastructure as Code practices—source control, CI/CD, immutable configuration—to the automation challenges of heterogeneous bare-metal infrastructure.

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

Lessons Learned from a Ransomware Attack

A school district’s ransomware attack reveals how to recognize warning signs, coordinate incident response, recover systems, and strengthen defenses against recurrence.

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

Beyond Firefighter vs. Safety Matches - Growing the DevSecOps Pipeline

Explores how to build a balanced DevSecOps talent pipeline by avoiding security overspecialization, unrealistic generalization, and overloading individuals instead of sharing responsibility.

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

Computing Performance - On the Horizon

A forward-looking survey of how processors, memory, storage, networking, runtimes, hypervisors, and observability may shape computing performance.

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

Kind Engineering - How to Engineer Kindness

Practical ways for engineers to build kindness through code reviews, psychological safety, honest communication, and giving and receiving feedback.

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

The Remote Working Security Conundrum - What Is Reasonably Secure Anyway?

A practical tour of securing remote work environments, from physical threats and hardware trust to segmented browsers, adversarial networks, and remote attestation.

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

It's Time to Debloat the Cloud with Unikraft

Explore how Unikraft creates compact, high-performance cloud images tailored to individual applications.

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

Disorganizing Your SRE Organization

A year-long reorganization of SRE practices, tools, and culture explores democratized responsibility, team autonomy, declarative workflows, ownership, and adapting to distributed work.

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