SREcon18 Americas Call for Participation

Overview

This year, SREcon Americas will focus on the leading edge of SRE. We'll pursue this theme across the technical landscape, foundational principles, culture and values, and organizational aspects of the profession.

SREcon attendees want to discuss robust solutions to system engineering problems, particularly in high-stakes environments. Beyond simply presenting new approaches and solutions, explain your reasoning behind them—what principles did you work from? How did those principles guide and shape the solution? If you're presenting a case study, how did you learn and improve from your experience? The best talks share a team's take on new idea, or inspire the audience to think beyond the challenges they know. We also welcome sessions about SRE philosophy, and this year we're also offering hands-on workshops, which will range from introductory to advanced topics.

Please join us in creating an excellent program for our fifth year of SREcon Americas, which will be the ninth SREcon event globally. Last year, we had over 600 attendees from over 100 companies, with backgrounds ranging from small startups, through tech giants with tens of thousands of employees, to finance and enterprise sector companies adopting or expanding SRE in their organizations.

Proposals

We are looking for proposals in the following formats:

Lightning Talks: Submit your proposals via the lightning talks submission portal.

• We invite proposals on any topic related to the practice of Site Reliability Engineering, but especially those related to the explicit conference themes.
• Speakers are strictly limited to five minutes, so make sure that you have only one core idea for your talk.
• You may submit multiple proposals.
• Timeline:
• The deadline for submissions has been extended to Saturday, February 17, 2018.
• The program committee will consider all submissions and respond with decisions by Friday, March 9, 2018.
• Please don't wait for a decision before registering for the conference, as the conference tends to sell out early.
• Lightning talk speakers are not eligible for any registration waivers.

Talks:

• 15-minute talks with 5 minutes for Q&A
• 30-minute talks with 10 minutes for Q&A

Workshops:

• Hands-on opportunities to deep dive and interact with topics or technologies. The duration is flexible.

The deadline for talk and workshop proposals is November 29, 2017. We’ll evaluate all submissions and get back to you by January 8, 2018. Accepted speakers will be required to confirm their plan to present along with their presentation information by January 19, 2018.

We will be scheduling practice sessions for all presenters, regardless of experience, because they improve the experience for attendees. Along with confirming their plan to present, speakers agree to participate in the practice sessions (details will be included in the acceptance notices).

Both presenters and organizers may withdraw or decline proposals for any reason, even after initial acceptance. Speakers must submit their own proposals; third-party submissions, even if authorized, will be rejected.

Suggested Topics

• Fundamentals
  
  • Mapping values to SRE practices (and how tools are a manifestation of these values, not goals in themselves)
  • Architectural patterns for reliability: Technical, process, and organizational
  • Measuring and systematically fixing risk, including both technical and non-technical components
• Engineering resilience against random failure (chaos) and sentient attackers
• The role of ML in reliable, resilient systems
• Culture/people
  
  • Leveraging diversity to enhance reliability and responsiveness
  • How to cultivate, recruit, and retain SREs
  • Catalyzing great SRE teams with a mixture of roles, including TPM, Tech Writer, UX design, and others
• SRE across platforms
  
  • Migrations & monitoring: When to outsource parts of your stack, and when/how to monitor and debug end to end
  • Cross-cloud & “serverless” strategies (working on multiple providers): How do people achieve this in the real world?
• Extending SRE culture to networking, security, privacy, and other facets of technology