If you’ve spent any time in tech circles lately, there are three letters you’ve surely heard: SRE. Site Reliability Engineering is the defining movement in tech today. Giants like Google and Amazon market their ability to provide reliable service and startups are now investing in reliability as an early priority. But what makes reliability engineering so important?

Using an open-source Go module from the community of other developers can be like going on a blind date. That “getting to know you” phase that can be awkward and risky. The more you know in advance, the better off you’ll be, right? When using software, having accurate and precise documentation is one of the most important aspects. Good software documentation tells the story of what a particular piece of code does and how to use it.

In our 2019 Blameless Summit, Paul Osman spoke about how to take postmortems or incident retrospectives to a new level. ‍The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Slides from this talk are available here. Paul Osman: I lead the SRE team at Under Armour. Who here knows about Under Armour as a tech company? Does anybody think about Under Armour as a tech company? Under Armour makes athletic attire, shirts and shoes.

Gaining visibility into cloud cost and driving greater overall efficiency is an ongoing journey where you need a solid understanding of your organization’s cloud consumption before taking the necessary steps to optimize their spend.

In 2009 AWS (Amazon Web Services) introduced a new EC2 pricing model known as reserved instances. In exchange for an upfront commitment of 1 or 3 years, reserved instances offer significant cost savings (anywhere from ~29% up to 72%) on cloud compute resources compared with on demand instances. Today, other cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform also offer similar pricing constructs. In this article you will learn.

Nishant Singh is an SRE at LinkedIn based in Bangalore. Currently, he is working towards building and maintaining applications that improve the overall MTTD (Mean time to detect) and MTTR (Mean time to recover) of the site. He likes to build services and play with the latest technologies. Before LinkedIn, Nishant worked for a few companies in the security and e-commerce domain as a DevOps engineer where he was primarily responsible for building infrastructure, deployment pipelines and security.

You know the feeling. You’ve just deployed a new version to production and are monitoring the Rollbar dashboard for any new errors or looking out for any Slack notifications. You’re keeping an eye on the number of new or reactivated errors, their severity level, and triaging to see which errors need to be assigned and to whom. Now what if you could automate these tasks?

When monitoring third-party applications with Prometheus, you’ll need an exporter if the application doesn’t already expose metrics in the appropriate format. How do you find an appropriate exporter, and once you have your exporters, how should you organize your label taxonomies to reflect your infrastructure? Many applications in the systems you’re in charge of will be third-party applications, which do not natively expose Prometheus-formatted metrics.

We’re very excited to announce that Ansible roles to deploy StackStorm have been promoted to new major version 2.0.0! There has been a lot of activity recently on the ansible-st2 repository, with 4 releases in the last couple of months. Ansible can now be used to deploy StackStorm on more modern operating systems and with newer third-party applications.

AWS Activate is a program that provides startups with free AWS credits. There are specific requirements startups must meet in order to qualify, and not all startups that qualify end up receiving the free AWS credits. Still, for any startup planning on running their app in AWS, it’s probably worth a try. AWS Activate has two packages: the Founders package and the Portfolio package.