SRE for Everyone Else, with Steve McGhee

Jun 18, 2021

Steve McGhee worked as an SRE at Google for almost 10 years, then took a job outside the company. He was tasked with recreating “Google Production” and SRE practice from first principals, but with three books, modern cloud providers, and the entire Kubernetes ecosystem to help. How did he do? Learn about that which you can and can’t replace.

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• web: kubernetespodcast.com
• mail: [e-mail]
• twitter: @kubernetespod

Chatter of the week

• Dan’s recent work has come up in episodes 136, 142, and 151, to name but a few
  • Episode 39, with Dan Lorenc
• Tekton CD
• Sigstore
• Dan’s Peter Jackson look
• Sigstore Root Key Ceremony
• IANA Key Signing Ceremonies and changes in the time of COVID

News of the week

• GKE news:
  • New Tau VMs on Google Cloud and GKE
  • Committed use discounts for GKE Autopilot
  • Cloud Onboard training for GKE with Kaslin Fields, on June 22
• Stackrox/Red Hat State of Kubernetes Security blog post and report
• etcd 3.5
• SLSA: Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts
• Ensemble, by Tesera
• Harbor operator 1.0
• Weave GitOps Core
  • Episodes 144 and 145, with Alexis Richardson
• WSO2 launches Choreo and acquires Platformer
• KubeCon EU 2021 transparency report
• COVID vaccine required to attend fall 2021 Linux Foundation events
• Opinions on Knative positioning by Ahmet Alp Balkan
  • Episode 66

Links from the interview

• LG Chocolate Phone and the Crazy Frog
• Good SRE is the inverse of the XKCD comic on Standards
• “Breaking Prod: More than once, I personally made it impossible to use google search from a phone (for a little bit). Like, for everyone on the planet.”
• San Luis Obispo, California (SLO)
• GIFEE, coined at CoreOS
• Rebuilding SRE, from Memory
  • Ben Treynor Sloss
• Homer Simpson’s Car
• Postcards from the future and the crystal ball
  • It is against the law to have a sleeping donkey in your bathtub after 7pm
  • How To Avoid Huge Ships
• Prometheus
• Canary releases
  • Canary deployments with Istio
• SLO Math, by Steve McGhee (SLOconf 2021)
• The SRE I Aspire To Be, by Yaniv Aknin (SREcon 2019)
  • RAID. a Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks
• Deployment Archetypes for Cloud Applications, by Brad Calder and Anna Berenberg
• Steve McGhee on Twitter