SREcon18 Europe/Middle East/Africa Call for Participation

Overview

SREcon18 Europe/Middle East/Africa invites talks on all technical aspects of the design and operation of highly reliable computing systems at scale, as well as SRE philosophy, leadership, hiring, and training. Talks may present a team’s experience with new ideas or technology, or describe current best practices and the state of the art.

The conference welcomes participants from SRE organisations of all sizes and from teams of any age/maturity level. We especially invite practitioners who work on computing systems "beyond HTTP": from pipelines and datastores to session-based services or video streaming.

In 2018, our theme is Sustainable Reliability Engineering. Sustainability is important for our systems, our teams and our people.

On the technical side, we want to hear about how you approach technical debt. When do you choose to incur it, manage it, and how do you reduce or eliminate it? Tell us about your experiences of refactoring and reimplementing creaking systems.

The Stella Report introduced a new concept: "dark debt." In general, this could be rephrased as "technical engineering liabilities in large systems" which can develop over time. These are subtle and unanticipated interactions between distant parts of complex systems that only reveal themselves via deviations from intended or expected operation. Do sustainable systems have less dark debt? How has your organisation experienced dark debt, and what have you done about it?

On the people side, we want to hear how you deal with or prevent operational overload and individual burnout. What approaches do you take to improve your team's effectiveness over time? How do you create cultures that encourage learning and growth?

Submissions do not have to relate directly to the sustainable engineering theme. Proposals on any topic related to Site Reliability Engineering are welcome, including, but not limited to:

• Systems engineering
• Distributed systems theory and practical solutions to real-world problems
• Monitoring, alerting, and how to define SLOs that work
• Load balancing and load-shedding
• Techniques and tools for troubleshooting and debugging distributed systems, operating systems and networks
• Risk management
• Compliance (for instance, with the GDPR), and measuring and systematically fixing risk
• Disaster preparedness and recovery from disasters big and small
• Incident management and postmortems
• Cloud and SaaS migrations
• When to outsource parts of your stack and
• How to monitor and debug end to end
• Automation, deployment, release management and launch management
• Capacity planning, software performance and efficiency
• Culture
• Extending SRE practices to networking, security, privacy, and other facets of technology
• Leadership and influence in SRE
• SRE culture, psychological safety, ethics, social change and inclusion

Proposal Formats and Key Dates

We are looking for proposals in the following formats:

• Talks
• 20-minute talks with 5 minutes for Q&A
• 40-minute talks with 10 minutes for Q&A
• 5-minute lightning talks
• Workshops
  • Half-day workshops that focus on skill development or deeper understanding of a given area, rather than being a tutorial session on using a specific tool. These workshops will be three hours long, broken into two 90-minute sessions with a coffee break.
• Panels or Unconference Sessions
  • Suggested topics for panels or Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions. The program committee will provide assistance organising these, if accepted.

If there's a particular topic or speaker you really hope to see at the conference, please drop us a message at srecon18europe_chairs@usenix.org.

We will accept proposals until April 3, 2018, via the submission form. We'll evaluate those and get back to you by May 14, 2018. Accepted speakers will be required to confirm their plan to present along with their talk information by May 22, 2018.

Lightning talk proposals will be accepted until July 20, 2018 via the submission form with notification for accepted talks on July 28, 2018.

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.

Proposal Guidelines

See the Proposal Guidelines page for information and advice on how to submit your proposal to SREcon18 Europe/Middle East/Africa.

For some background on the talks selection process, read this USENIX Blog Post.