topics.txt

Local Development
Monolith
Code Review
Pre Merge Hooks
Active Passive Clusters
Microservices
Leftshift Reliability Design
Graceful Service Degradation (Individual CUJs)
Left Shift Performance Testing
Graceful Service Degradation (Universal)
Bounded Context
Protobufs

Smoke Tests
Automated Unit Testing
Multi Service Development
Distributed Systems Awareness
Deployments in Place
Feature Flags
Active Active Multi Cluster
Basic Chaos Testing
Serious Design/Domain Driven Design
Design Around Universal Failure Domains
Sharded Data

Manual Tests
Code Version Control
functional tests
semi automated integration
Data versioning
traffic shifting
instrumentation for in process traces
Backwards Version Compatibility by default
Canary Deployments
Left Shift QA testing (SDET)
E2E testing
Multi Cluster Rollout Policy
Universal Smart Retries
Sharded Serving

manual integration tests
regular release cadence
containers
Blue Green Deployments
Fuzz Testing
Distributed systems (no active/passive)
Automatic assured capacity and performance testing
andon cord/big red button
Code Quality Threshold (code reuse preferred)

Low Context Architecture
Language Readability
Only customize components needing customization

Design for Chaos
Formal methods (e.g. TLA+)

Local data storage
Single Zone
DNS / SImple LB
Basic linear capacity projection
Advanced Loadbalancing
IaC
Understand Infrastructure Failure Domains
Auto Failover
Failure Testing in Prod
N+1 as standard
N+2 Thinking
N+2 Global Planning

Pet Host
1+ computer
distributed storage
alternate site replication
Cattle Infrastructure
Container Orchestrator
Auto Scaling
Eliminate SPOFs (hardware & software)
Service Discovery
Drain/Spill (N/S & E/W)

Basic Loadtesting
Multi Zone
Holtz-Winter capacity projections
Failure Injection
N+1 Regional Planning
L7 Global LB

High Water Mark Prediction
Assured Capacity Load Testing
Real World Traffic Load Testing
L4 Regional Load Balancing

Multi Region

Off-host backup
RPO/RTO defined
DR Plan
RPO/RTO refined
DR plan simulated/tabletop
DR plan tested periodically
Continuous Integration
Continuous Delivery
Regular BCP Testing (run from alternate site)
% Based Traffic Steering
Active Active Datastores
Internal Rate Limiting
Autonomous Response Systems
Automatic Rollbacks

Manually created machines
Manual VM Images
Custom VMs via semi-automation
ITIL style NOC
DR Site Exists
Manual remediation playbooks
Formal Incident Response Roles
Formal Incident Response Processes
Rollbacks/Rollforwards tested
Continuous Deployment
External Rate Limiting
Centralized Production Changelog
Proactive DDoS Countermeasures
Load Prediction

Manual Remediation
Scheduled Downtime
Basic Incident Management
Repeatable Deployments
Automation of Toil
Problem Management Function
Dedicated Operations Tooling
Automated Service Discovery
Data Collection Automation
Mostly Automated Remediation

Patching Windows
Gold Image Automation
Central Certificate Rotation
Breakglass Secret Access
Global Policy Enforcement
Vanilla DDoS Protection
DiRT Testing

Product Specific DDoS Protection (e.g. WAF)

Host Metrics and Logging
Per Host Alarms
Host Ping Tests
Synthetic Monitoring
APM Metrics and Traces
Internal SLAs
Error Budgets
Custom In Process Tracing
Cross Service Transaction Testing
"Multi Machine Debugging
Anomaly Detection
Observability Integration Across Tools

On host log grep
SSH to Grep Logs
Centralized Log Collection
Realtime Centralized Log Analytics
Automated Topology View
Service Level Indicators (SLI)
Record and Replay Traffic
Advanced Vizualizations (heatmaps)
Near Miss Detection

Service Level Objectives (SLO)
Event Correlation

High Context Behaviours
RCA/5 Whys
Incentivise trust/safety
Understand Business Impacts
Blameless Postmortems
Postmortem reviews/actions
Single Central CAB
Holistic View of R9y as high value
Reliability Executive/Sponsor exists
Reliability has a seat at the table
R9y is a product differentiator
R9y can stop feature launch
Proactive Risk and Scaling Analysis

Managing pet configuration drift
Measure Everything
Data Driven Decisions
Service Ownership
Incentivise cross silo collaboration
Dedicated R9y staffing
Change Freezes
Vertical Scale is an Antipattern
SRE SWE roles introduced
Empowered R9y staff
R9y Embedded in High Level Strategy and Operations
Advanced Cost Optimization
Focus on prevention and near misses instead of outages

TODO Lists
Waterfall Projects/PMO
SMART Goals
Goals -> Objectives (OKRs)
Architecture Reviews
High Performing Staff (Promotion and Hiring)
Reactive Risk Analysis
Basic Cost Optimisation

Introducing Dedicated SREs
Toil Budgets
Decreased Reliance on 3rd party SaaS