USENIX Courses

Off the Beaten Path - Moving Observability Focus from Your Service to Your Customer

This talk examines how SRE teams can shift observability from service health and business metrics toward customer experience, usability, accessibility, and feedback.

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

Jupyter as Incident Response Tool

Use Jupyter notebooks to investigate and remediate a cache slowdown during an SRE incident, then document the response for retrospective.

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

Are We Getting Better Yet? - Progress Toward Safer Operations

Use incident analysis, richer metrics, and chaos experiments to reveal progress toward safer, more adaptive operations.

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

The Secret Lives of SREs - Controlling the Costs of Coordination across Remote Teams

Research findings on how SRE teams coordinate under uncertainty during outages, and how tools, dependencies, and incident command shape cognitive workload.

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

Identifying Hidden Dependencies

Deliberate node failures, observability, and error budgets expose hidden dependencies and improve the reliability of stateful production systems.

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

Avoiding Goodhart's Law - Use SLOs as Tools Not Cudgels

Use SLI, SLO, and error budgets to negotiate application and business stress without turning metrics into punitive thresholds.

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

Give Your PXE Wings - Bootstrapping Explained

Breaks PXE bootstrapping into stages—from downloading a bootloader to loading an operating system—and shows how to automate provisioning.

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

Automatically Detect the Top Performance & Scalability Issues in Distributed Architectures

Automate detection and remediation of distributed performance anti-patterns with trace analysis and SLI/SLO quality gates in CI/CD pipelines.

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

Implementing Distributed Consensus

Explore Paxos through Skinny, a distributed lock service, and work through the practical challenges of implementing consensus under failures.

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

When - Bin - Sh Attacks - Revisiting Automate All the Things

Examines how pervasive automation can harm SRE teams and complex socio-technical systems, with strategies for safer automation and coordination.

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

The Smallest Possible SRE Team

Learn how a very small SRE team can amplify its organizational impact through leverage, data, tools, communication, architecture reviews, and game days.

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

Confessions of a Systems Engineer - Learning from My 20+ Years of Failure

Lessons from two decades of engineering failures for designing and operating reliable large-scale online services.

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

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