Theo Schlossnagle, Circonus
Over the last twenty years, complex distributed systems have been deployed to solve the leading challenges in the systems resiliency and robustness realm. At this point in systems architecture design, distributed systems are everywhere in everything; even the most simple architectures incorporate distributed software and carry with that the failure scenarios they bring.
SREs are put in an even more complicated situation, because of their wide net or responsibilities, to manage distributed systems of distributed systems. Things can and will go wrong and one of the fundamental skills for SREs going forward will be strong distributed systems reasoning skills.
In this talk we discuss the types of failure scenarios that distributed systems bring with them (with anecdotes) and develop various reasoning skills that can be used to tackle these challenges with increased confidence.
Theo Schlossnagle, Circonus
![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/styles/speaker_photo/public/schlossnagle_theo_100x115_0.png?itok=htGPPBmJ)
Theo Schlossnagle is the founder and CEO of Circonus. Previously, he founded OmniTI, the go-to source for organizations facing today’s most challenging scalability, performance, and security problems; was the Founder of Message Systems, Inc. now Sparkpost; and researched distributed systems at JHU. Theo is the author of Scalable Internet Architectures (Sams) and a frequent speaker at IT conferences worldwide. He is a member of the IEEE and a senior member of the ACM and serves on the editorial board of the ACM’s Queue magazine. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science from Johns Hopkins University.
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author = {Theo Schlossnagle},
title = {Distributed Systems, Like It or Not},
year = {2017},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}