USENIX Courses

The Biases Confronting SREs

Explore how cognitive and organizational biases shape the SRE role and how candid conversations and allies can help mitigate them.

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

The Pandemic and The Classroom - Enabling Education for Millions

How Microsoft Teams adapted its architecture, capacity, caching, hardware optimization, and incident management to support millions of remote students during the pandemic.

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

A Fresh Look at Operational Debt

A structured model of operational debt links process gaps to business risk, helping SRE teams prioritize backlogs and reduce toil.

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

The Origins of USAA's Postmortem of the Week

A behind-the-scenes account of building USAA’s IT-wide Postmortem Review meeting, with tips for launching one.

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

How Our SREs Safeguard Nanosecond Performance - at Scale - in an Environment Built to Fail

Learn how Optiver applies SRE principles, automation, and risk controls to safeguard nanosecond performance in high-frequency trading.

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

SRE "Power Words" - The Lexicon of SRE as an Industry

Explores how shared SRE terms such as “toil” shape communication, practice, and the field’s developing professional identity.

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

When Systems Flatline - Enhancing Incident Response with Learnings from the Medical Field

A conceptual talk on adapting medical triage, stabilization, and checklists to technical incident response.

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

Ceci N'est Pas un CPU Load

A critique of digital mental models in DevOps, using analog electronics to rethink how engineers combine and troubleshoot software systems.

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

Spike Detection in Alert Correlation at LinkedIn

Learn how LinkedIn uses spike detection and modified z-scores to separate meaningful alerts from false positives in large-scale microservice outages.

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

Building Actionable Code Ownership

Learn how Pinterest designed a scalable, queryable code ownership framework for 1,700 API endpoints across 70 engineering teams.

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

Unleashing Generative AI - Improving Developer Productivity in SRE

See how SRE teams can delegate repetitive development work to generative AI to make room for complex problem-solving.

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

From "Keeping the Lights On" to "Designing the LEDs" - A Detailed Review of Our Journey Transforming 500+ Engineers

A detailed account of shifting 500+ production engineers from process-driven work to an SRE-centered software engineering organization.

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

Challenges of Managing Real-Time Financial Market Data Storage

A look at Bloomberg’s move from local disks to cloud storage for real-time market data, including its custom chunk-streaming solution and migration lessons.

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

Multicloud and the Chamber of Secrets

A multicloud SaaS team’s strategy for storing and serving hundreds of credentials securely while meeting engineers’ needs and audit controls.

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

Mastering Chaos - Achieving Fault Tolerance with Observability-Driven Prioritized Load Shedding

Aperture uses observability-driven prioritized load shedding to contain cascading failures and retry storms while keeping microservices stable.

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