In the world of technology, the stakes have never been higher. The move to the cloud and microservices to maximize agility has given way to digital disruptors and unprecedented competitive threats. As distributed systems become increasingly complex, the scale of ‘unknown unknowns’ increases. On top of this, customer expectations are sky-high. The cost of downtime is catastrophic, with customers willing to churn if their needs are not promptly met.

Here’s the second issue of SREview! This monthly zine features epic Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community.

Our 2020 SRE Report is ready! We launched the SRE survey 2020 this January with the goal of understanding the current state of SRE. The survey covered a range of topics including: As we neared the end of the survey period, the SRE community was in the midst of a sudden change. SRE teams were forced to migrate to all-remote IT. We realized we would not be able to provide an accurate analysis without considering this shift in how SRE teams were operating in this new environment.

Blameless recently had the privilege of hosting some fantastic leaders in the SRE and resilience community for a panel discussion. Our panelists discussed the effects of imposter syndrome especially during high tempo situations, how to use it to our advantage and overcome doubt, and how culture directly affects the availability of our systems. The transcript below has been lightly edited, and if you’re interested in watching the full panel, you can do so here.

It’s 3 AM and you are roused out of sleep by the dull buzzing of your phone in the other room. Some sort of emergency, you conclude as you fumble with the lockscreen. There it is: an alert that the API governing user registration is acting up. When we think about the lag between time of incident and time to respond, it’s not just about how long the system went down. How long it physically takes us to respond to the problem also contributes to lost downtime.