SREcon24 Europe/Middle East/Africa

Laura de Vesine, Datadog, Inc.


It's a strong principle of good UX design that users should get feedback about the results of their actions, to help prevent errors. Experienced SREs know to build in additional observability to systems to watch our systems change as we mutate them, but these are typically out-of-band and require a conscious, deliberate action to observe -- so getting good feedback into our actions requires constant vigilance and training of new users. What if we instead built control planes that tell us exactly what we've done, and what effect that is having?
This talk explores various patterns of "fire and forget" control planes in production systems, how each one contributes to outages, and some simple solutions to build better tools for operations.


https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon24emea/presentation/de-vesine

Philip Rowlands, Jane Street


This is a talk about calendars, clocks, and computers. We’ll look at the metrology of the second, from candles to atoms, and consider how your phone always seems to know the right time.

If you’ve ever wondered why is today Thursday? or how was the Gregorian calendar adopted? then come and learn the mistakes to avoid the next time you are the Pope.

If you’ve ever wondered why do these two clocks disagree? then come and learn about the challenges of finding the elusive perfect tick, and why it’s not at the top of Mount Everest.

And if you’ve ever wondered how calendars and clocks work together in modern computer systems, then come and learn about protocols and APIs for keeping clocks reliable and accurate.


https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon24emea/presentation/rowlands