Five Takeways to Apply to Your Reliability Strategy — This is my detailed analysis of the reliability failure based on details as published in the incident report. Note the opinions expressed in this blog are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of any organization I was previously, currently, or will in the future be…

Six Takeways to Apply to Your Reliability Strategy — This is my detailed analysis of the reliability failure based on the details in the published incident report. Note the opinions expressed in this blog are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of any organization I was previously, currently, or will in the future be…

Learn how to generate and retain monthly stats on Medium — Medium™️ provides basic statistics for publications through the menu dropdown ‘stats’ option, which takes you to the stats page showing 30 or 90 day views and reads. These stats are a snapshot of the current numbers, but Medium does not provide a way to view them as a time series. …

The first answer to “make this more reliable” isn’t “make it a set of microservices” — Here in Expedia Group™️, we’ve developed a short 2-hour introductory session on reliability engineering. The session has a short exercise at the end with a simple architecture, and we ask the students for suggestions to make it more reliable. Inevitably the first suggestion is to break up the large central…

How to stop your service from getting overloaded — Success is lovely. Too much success can be hard to deal with unless you’re prepared for it. This is true for both life and your applications. In terms of applications, you ideally want to take all the traffic you can get. To accept all the traffic possible you have 3…

How do reliability costs stack up? Where do they come from? — A common Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) estimate is that the more reliability you want, the more it costs, with a rule of thumb that each additional 9 of reliability (eg. moving from 99% to 99.9% reliability) costs 10 times (10x) more to achieve. But what contributes to that cost increase…

The modern garbage collection tuning procedure for JVMs — At the recent java2days conference, I presented my latest talk “Practical Garbage Collection Tuning For Anyone” which included a detailed decision chart for tuning your JVM’s garbage collection (GC). …

In this decade we entered a new era of IT: rapid release as a standard. This practice has grown from niche to such a common practice that many open source projects are available to assist your rapid release pipeline, and it’s one of the reasons our industry standardized so quickly…

Success is a double-edged sword — increased request volume and more edge case requests stress your server. Many a server has failed because of lack of scalability in handling that higher volume of requests, and from edge case requests that thrash memory or CPU. There are 3 legs to managing…