SREcon24 Europe/Middle East/Africa Call for Participation

Overview

Last year, we solicited talks on the then new trend of cost and resource pressure: doing more with less in the face of uncertain future growth and revenue for the technology industry. What started as a set of trends is seeming more and more like a new status quo. Funding and revenue are less certain; organisations are pressured to deliver tangible value (financial or otherwise) to stakeholders. In the face of this changing landscape, the nature of SRE work and how that work is justified changes.

For SREcon24 EMEA, we would like to invite our community to look ahead, and participate by submitting talks with a focus on emerging industry trends such as (and not limited to):

• The business case for SRE
• Evolution of the SRE space
• Attracting, retaining, and nurturing talent
• Security {and compliance} and SRE
• SRE and other industries

Every talk submission is absolutely welcome, as well as areas we have not explored enough in past conferences. Furthermore, apart from this year’s primary areas, we have a keen interest in learning about when crises were effectively averted; and when all the improvements you have done to your systems brought results.

Please join us in creating an excellent program for SREcon24 EMEA!

SREcon participants come from a wide variety of backgrounds: small startups, tech giants with tens of thousands of employees, finance and enterprise sector companies adopting or expanding SRE in their organisations, and academia. New speakers are encouraged to submit talks; many of our best talks have come from people with new perspectives to share, and the previous year most certainly has given us all new experiences and stories we can share and learn from.

We welcome and encourage participation from all individuals in any country, including people that are underrepresented in, or historically excluded from, technology, including but not limited to people of all colours, women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, neurodiverse participants, students, veterans, and others with unique characteristics. Similarly, we welcome participants from diverse professional roles: QA testers, customer experience/support, security teams, DBAs, network administrators, compliance experts, UX designers, health care professionals, scientists, and economists. Regardless of who you are or the job title you hold, if you are a technologist who faces unique challenges and shares our areas of interest, we encourage you to be a part of SREcon24 Europe/Middle East/Africa.

Talks

• Talks
• 15-minute talks followed by 5 minutes for Q&A
• 35-minute talks followed by 10 minutes for Q&A
• Lightning Talks
• Lightning Talks for SREcon24 EMEA squeeze ten talks into one hour, the highest info density of the whole conference. Proposals are welcome on any SREcon topic, provided it can be covered in just four minutes.
• Talk submissions are due by 18 September, with slides for selected Lightning Talks due by 16 October. Please submit your proposals via the web submission system.
• Please note that lightning talk speakers do not receive special conference registration discounts and that only registered attendees may present lightning talks.

Suggested Topics

• The business case for SRE, as funding and revenue become more uncertain
• What is the main value proposition for SRE in an era of scarcity
• Main participants of the on-call rotation
• Strategies for performance, capacity, and cost optimisation
• Navigating cloud migration (on to off cloud and vice versa)
• Legacy systems maintenance
• Can we demonstrate the value of SRE to non-tech people?
• Evolution of the SRE space
• Are we innovating as much as we used to?
• Are "managed" open source services our new struggle?
• Attracting, retaining, and nurturing talent
• What is an SRE’s career path?
• Are there two disjoint sets of SREs/production people?
• Service/cloud-native SREs
• Infrastructure/cloud mechanics
• Security and Compliance
• What is the SRE perspective and role in a security incident?
• What are effective mechanisms and tools to manage supply chain security concerns?
• As the industry continues the drive towards cloud-native development, with increased dependencies on third-party libraries and software, how does this change our services’ risk and reliability posture?
• DSA/DMA in Europe, and their implications for running production systems
• SRE and other industries
• Legacy systems/organisations with a long history, where SRE is emerging
• Retail, Transportation, Healthcare, etc.
• What can the tech industry (re)learn from other industries?

Systems Engineering/Principles Track

With the popularity of the Core Principles track at previous SREcon conferences, we are continuing this component at SREcon24 EMEA. Systems Engineering track talks should focus on aspects of foundational technologies that are important to understand when supporting and scaling infrastructure.

For this track, we are looking for a number of topics, such as:

• Performance (e.g., CPU affinity, bottlenecks)
• Databases (e.g., how is data stored on disk in MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.?)
• Observability (e.g., monitoring overview, events vs. metrics, whitebox vs. blackbox, visualisations, debugging, etc.)
• Distributed Systems (e.g., consistency and consensus, containers)
• Network (e.g., SD WAN, HTTP routing and load balancing, DNS)
• Operating Systems Internals (e.g., Filesystems, caching, kernel tuning)
• Firmware (e.g., Open Source Firmware, UEFI)
• Security (e.g., TPMs, Hardware Security Modules, transport encryption, filesystem encryption, data management)

Speaker Information

To see the details of what we want to know about your proposal to speak, we encourage you to click through the talks submission system.

If you are a new presenter or would just like some extra help, please reach out. We can provide support via practice sessions.

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

SREcon24 Europe/Middle East/Africa is scheduled to be held in Dublin. All presentations will require in-person participation. If public health restrictions intervene, we will adjust the requirements as the situation evolves.

If you have questions about this Call for Participation, feel free to drop us a message at srecon24emea_chairs@usenix.org.

Background (Overarching goals of the world-wide SREcon conferences)

SREcon is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale. Our purpose is to be inclusive as we bring together ideas representative of our diverse community, whether its members are focusing on a global scale, launching new products and ideas for a small business, or pivoting their approach to unite software and systems engineering. SREcon challenges both those new to the profession as well as those who have been involved in SRE or related endeavours for years. The conference culture is built upon respectful collaboration amongst all participants in the community through critical thought, deep technical insights, continuous improvement, and innovation.

For more information on the themes and programs of past conferences, see the list of past conferences.