Slight Reliability
Learning SRE, one day at a time.
Episodes
From the day we invented computers we've been struggling to keep applications running and delivering services to the business. Is this latest wave of AI helping or hurting us?
This week I'm joined by Causely founder Shmuel Kliger to dive into...
๐ The three waves of AI hype over the decades (the history of AI)
โ ๏ธ The dangers of over-promising and under-delivering what AI can do
๐ง What is causal reaso...
What is operational intelligence and how is it different from observability or BI?
This week I'm joined by SquaredUp's VP of Innovation Adam Kinniburgh to answer that question and many more including...
โ What is operational intelligence?
๐ Relating observability back to customer, business, or revenue
๐ The value of giving stakeholders confidence
๐ Who bridges the gap between tech and business o...
How does leading platform teams differ from leading product teams?
This week I'm joined by experienced technology leader Dinesh Sukhija to answer that question and many more including...
โ What is a platform team?
โฝ Coaching engineers to focus on outcomes
โ๏ธ Connecting platform initiatives to business goals
โ Identifying the limiters in your team
๐ค Spreading knowledge and avoiding single points of ...
How has my first two years as a manager in tech been? What have I learned? What do I need to work on?
This week I share my experiences over the past couple of years. I cover:
๐ฅ My recent close call with burnout
๐ซถ How I attempted to build a team culture
๐ช The importance of tough conversations
๐ฅฑ How roles and responsibilities might be boring to think about but is critical
โ What's next?
...and much...
How could AI help human beings negotiate the mountains of telemetry we collect to get simple and fast insight?
This week I'm joined by Ottermon AI CEO and founder Checo Pacheco about the lifecycle of observability coverage and tooling within organisations and how AI is helping to find signals amongst the noise and reduce cognitive load for SREs. We discuss...
๐ The need for a layer of logic on top of our telemetry...
What is chaos engineering and how is it being used in 2025?
This week I'm joined by Gremlin CEO and founder Kolton Andrus to discuss...
๐ช๏ธ What is chaos engineering and what is its origins?
๐ชด How has it evolved over the year?
๐ค The role of AI agents in SRE work
๐ฐ Justifying the value of chaos engineering
๐โโ๏ธโโก๏ธ How do I get started?
...and much more.
You can find Kolton on:
LinkedIn: https://www....
What are Team Topologies? How can they be used to deliver value simpler and more effectively (and in a more humane way)?
This week I'm joined by Luke McManus to discuss...
โฐ๏ธ What are the four team topologies?
๐ Can we have too much collaboration?
โ Team interaction models
๐ Cognitive load
๐โโ๏ธโโก๏ธ Value dynamics mapping
...and much more.
You can find Luke on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lu...
How do you begin contributing to an open source project? What's it like? What do you get out of it?
This week I'm joined by Wendy Ha who shares her unique story of joining the Kubernetes project and becoming a contributor. We explore...
โฐ๏ธ What it's like working on one of the biggest open source projects in the world
๐ The benefits of contributing to open source
โ How much time and effort does it...
As an #SRE how do you influence senior leadership to get support and priority for the things you care about?
To answer this question I'm joined by Nora Jones, founder of Jeli and now Head of Pricing, Product Strategy and Growth at PagerDuty. Our conversation touches on...
๐ค How understanding needs to flow both ways (between engineers and leaders)
๐จ Reliability is as much an art as a science
๐ Using napki...
This week I do a retrospective on the Slight Reliability podcast.
๐ How many people listen to it?
โค๏ธ How do I feel about the show?
๐ What's going well?
๐ชด What could be better?
โ What's next for the show?
If you want to check out the podcast that came before Slight Reliability, you can find Performance Time archived on YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/@performance-time
You can find St...
Have you burned out at work? What was your experience? How did you work through it?
This week I'm joined by the incredible Colette Alexander to discuss what burnout is, what it means, and we both share our personal experiences burning out at work. We cover...
๐ฅ What is burnout?
โ Why does it happen?
๐ซ What are the symptoms?
๐ฅ Fight, flight, or freeze
๐งโ๐ Advice on how to recover
...and much more...
This week I'm joined by the wonderful Hanson Ho to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities in making our mobile apps observable! We cover...
๐ฑ The mobile/backend observability divide
โ๏ธ The challenge of distributed tracing on mobile apps
๐ The entire device runtime environment matters for your app
๐ค The quest for user-centric mobile observability
โ
Advice on how to get started with mobil...
This week on the I'm joined once more by SRE leader Michelle Casey who gives a broad and shallow introduction to resilience engineering. We cover...
๐๏ธโโ๏ธ Reliability VS Robustness VS Resilience
๐งฉ What is a complex system?
๐ข Safety one/safety two
๐ง Mental models
๐ฉ Human error
...and so much more.
Resources from this episode:
Four concepts for resilience (paper) by Dr. David Woods https://www.rese...
This week on the 100th episode I'm joined by DevOps and Resilience Engineering legend John Allspaw to talk about learning (especially from incidents). We discuss...
๐ Classroom VS situated learning
๐ค The myth of the perfect handover
ITIL as a coping strategy to try and make sense of the organic, wild, and messy
๐ฅ How you cannot incentivise to avoid incidents (it doesn't work that way)
โค๏ธโ๏ฟฝ...
This week I'm joined by SRE leader Trent Hornibrook who shares a story about how he improved on-call early in his career, and then we explore the broader theme of focusing on the things that matter in observability, incident response, on-call, and beyond. We discuss...
๐ Empowering engineers to implement change in your org
๐งโ๐ผ Focusing on what matters (customer & business > technology)
๐ Not jus...
This week I'm joined by SRE leader Andrew Hatch from Cisco ThousandEyes to talk about a dirty word in the resilience community... root cause. In this excellent conversation we explore...
๐ Is the root cause of every incident the big bang?
๐ฆ How the value of root cause degrades as complexity increases
๐ซฃ That if the culture is not blameless, people will hide things
๐ณ Alternative approaches to root ca...
This week I'm joined by David Dick from 2 Steps to (finally!) discuss synthetic monitoring. We cover...
๐ค What is synthetic monitoring?
๐ฆพ What are the benefits and drawbacks to using it?
โข๏ธ Non-web based synthetics (the tough stuff)
๐น Combining RUM and synthetics
๐ซข Does synthetics need an OTEL-like framework?
...and much more.
You can find David on:
This week I'm joined by Cin7 Engineering Director Milan Brown to unpack the challenges of technology management and leadership. We discuss...
โ๏ธ Theory X vs Theory Y management
๐ฃ๏ธ Intention based leadership and communication
๐ข Conditions in an org for people to thrive
๐ตโ๐ซ How do you learn to manage and lead?
๐ซค Managing people when you're not an expert in what they do
...and much more.
Resou...
This week Leon Adato and I break down the state of applying for roles in tech. We cover...
๐ What a resume or CV is and is not
๐ค Leveraging your connections rather than relying on applying cold
๐ช How most job descriptions are works of fiction
๐ฆพ White-fonting to game AI resume assessment
๐งช Experimental ways we could recruit
...and our pitch for Kubernetes the Rock Opera (and much more)
This week Priyam Kumar shares his story of moving from a massive organisation to a startup and the challenges and growth that came from that. We discuss...
๐ช War stories and examples of production incidents
๐ฉน The "hacks" we build to keep things running (and how maybe that's just normal)
๐ Keeping it simple... YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It!)
๐งฏ The perils of getting stuck in reactive ...
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