This episode discusses Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), a method for analyzing complex systems. Theo Klein, a Google SRE, and Jeffrey Snover, a Distinguished Engineer at Google, explain that STPA focuses on identifying how system accidents and losses occur due to a loss of control, rather than component failures. STPA helps identify design flaws early, even before code is written! The discussion highlights that STPA is a human-driven process, prompting critical questions about system goals and potential losses, and that Google is adapting the pure STPA approach for commercial software development to make it more practical and efficient.
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37:18
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37:18
The One with Startups and Adam Fletcher
In this episode, hosts Steve McGhee and Matt Siegler are joined by guest, Adam Fletcher, CEO and Co-Founder of MarketStreet. They discuss the current state of web development with LLMs, managing technical debt in startups, the evolution of infrastructure and reliability engineering, the role of community in technology, and the future of software engineering with AI.
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41:15
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41:15
The One with SLOs and Sal Furino
In this episode, Sal Furino, Customer Reliability Engineer at Bloomberg, discusses all things Service Level Objectives (SLOs) with hosts Steve McGhee and Matt Siegler. Together, they dig into what successful SLOs look like, how it relates to users, and how SLOs provide an effective framework for joint decisions about system reliability across product, engineering, and leadership teams.
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43:55
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43:55
The One With the Future of SRE and Matt Zelesko
Matt Zelesko, the head of Site Reliability Engineering at Google, discusses the evolution of SRE, highlighting the shift from traditional operations to a model that balances velocity and reliability to better serve the rapid advancements in AI and ML. He emphasizes that SRE's core mission is to enable partners to move quickly while meeting reliability goals, and that the sheer scale of Google's infrastructure necessitates the SRE model for cross-system problem-solving. Zelesko envisions AI as a crucial assistant for SREs, improving incident detection, mitigation, and postmortem processes, and allowing SREs to focus on more complex engineering challenges and risk management earlier in the development cycle, while still valuing the hands-on experience of operating production infrastructure.
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26:34
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26:34
The One with AI and Todd Underwood
In this Google Prodcast episode, Todd Underwood, a reliability expert from Anthropic with experience at Google and OpenAI, discusses the current state and future of AI in SRE. Todd and the hosts focus on the current state and future of AI and ML in production, particularly for SREs. Topics discussed include the challenges of AI-Ops, limitations of current anomaly detection, the potential for AI in config authoring and troubleshooting, trade-offs between product velocity and reliability, the evolving role of SREs in an AI-driven world, and book publication for optimal timing.
SRE Prodcast brings Google's experience with Site Reliability Engineering together with special guests and exciting topics to discuss the present and future of reliable production engineering!