Lessons from Iraq for Building and Running SRE Teams: From the Assembly Line to the Web

;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution

For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.

Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.

As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.

General Stanley McChrystal led the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq in the mid to late 2000s. While in command of the Task Force, he was responsible for transforming an organization that was dominated by Taylorist reductionism into an agile, responsive network that could dynamically adapt and win in the threat landscape around them. In his book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World [1], McChrystal outlines the key lessons that emerged from that process. The same issues and challenges face Site Reliability Engineers and managers for SRE teams as we cope with the complexity of our own and partner ecosystems.

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