Rootconf SRE on Friday brings together talks and discussions which have all the ingredients of a nice OTT drama.

Here’s why:

Jaideep Khandelwal opens the first act by telling you that the emperor is naked i.e., when you add fancy complexities to your architecture in the absence of no users for your product, you get a big cloud costs bill.
Jaideep goes on to elaborate various direct and indirect costs that add up to your organization’s cloud costs - absence of 'know’ledge about workloads, using the latest tool on the market which doesn’t add any direct value to your architecture, etc. The solution - know the gaps, and tweak your architecture.
Chinmay Naik follows next, touching on that one topic which hits the nerve with all software developers - MySQL. No wonder Swanand Pagnis’s masterclasses are an instant sell out, even before the announcements go out publicly. Chinmay shares his experience in one case, detailing the lessons he learned about, schema migrations (uff!). managing database security (whattay!), controlling replication lag (gah!), and making data available for analytics use case (wah, wah!).
You should follow Chinmay’s daily posts on LinkedIn about SRE tips and tricks. Wonder how he manages such daily uptime on LinkedIn. ;)
Next, Preeti Dewani delivers an eye-opening talk which will help you grasp the fundamental knowledge you require to question assumptions on approaching systems with high cardinality metrics. Higher cardinality == deeper insights. Put a ear to the ground, err, ear to your time series databases.
Raadhika Srinvasan goes next to talk about shell-based architecture approach to maintain high availability.
Most organzations do bucketing to manage failure i.e., put customers into different buckets so that buckets can be moved around. Using shell based architcture, you can achieve infrastructure bifurcation. Raadhika tells you how.
Next, Raadhika’s colleague from Freshworks, Anush Arvind, talks about stateful servers, emphasizing that orchestrating technology needs to be done in a manner where tech serves humans, not the other way round. Bottomline - innovation won’t come at the cost of user satisfaction. Enough said!
We take a break from engineering war stories, and listen to Biju speak about how to become an effective engineering manager. Did I say “effective engineering manager”, and not a tyrant? Haha! Rootconf SRE promises an extra cuppa coffee/chai to debate with Biju after this talk.
And now, the icing on the cake, or the climax. These three clever editors - Sarika Atri, Safeer CM and Saurabh Hirani - decided that the best should be reserved for the last. I am thinking of the drama series Slow Horses, where Jackson Lamb, almost always has the last laugh, at the expense of his team and himself appearing to be sloppy (but highly effective) horses. So, Harsh Mittal, Chief Architect at one of India’s topmost OTTs, gives us the inside dope about high stress systems and how these are run by presumably less stressed humans, creating what Harsh calls “malleable systems”.
It is the drama that Harsh’s colleague, Gaurav Kamboj, gave us a preview into when he spoke about servicing million users concurrently during cricket matches. Yikes, did I reveal the suspense?

All of this drama at SRE Conf, on Friday. What’s more! NOT A SINGLE SPONSORED TALK. Achieve perfection in viewing and grasping - whether you participate in person, or watch online.

Speakers are one aspect of a community gathering. The nicer part is interacting with fellow participants, most of who don’t really know each other, and are as nervous as the person sitting next to them, wondering how to start a conversation. And if there is any consolation to those who cannot attend in person, Rootconf promises to continue the interactions online, and with membership support, more frequently, in person.

The drama doesn’t end on Friday. We have a work-in-progress calendar planned for hosting longer talks/podcasts, master classes, and discussions on SRE, between Dec 2023 and March 2024. You can participate by either submitting an idea to speak, or submitting a topic for someone else to speak.

Support Rootconf with a membership, not only to be part of Rootconf SRE on Friday, but also to enable other interesting projects and activities.

Rootconf Hyderabad edition

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