SRE Weekly - SRE Weekly Issue #271

Should you keep things anonymous (“an engineer”), or should you say exactly who did what? Here’s a solid argument for the latter.

Lorin Hochstein

This article explores the downsides to a design composed of independent parts such as with microservices.

Ephraim Baron

Uber designed a tool they call Blackbox to perform simulated user requests and measure availability. I was struck by the candid discussion of complexity — no one person can understand how all of Uber’s microservices go together.

Carissa Blossom — Uber

They’ve made a YAML specification and validator for expressing SLOs in a machine-readable format.

Mike Vizard — Devops.com

A new spin: this one makes the distinction between “experimental tools” that affect the state of the system, and “observability tools” that are read-only.

Brendan Gregg

“Contributing factors: moose and squirrel.”

JJ Tang — Rootly

Every once in awhile, I need to pull out gdb. In times like those, it’s useful to have this kind of thing floating around in the back of my mind.

Brendon Scheinman — okcupid