2 posts tagged with "sre"

Introduction​

There are plenty of good SRE/Ops related podcasts out there. I follow a few of them and listen to episodes whose titles sound interesting. The problem with podcasts is that some episodes focus on one topic, and other episodes deal with a host of topics. In between there is filler and things that are not relevant to the topic but are necessary to carry on a conversation. Spending 30-60 minutes listening to podcasts is not always a great use of time.

A while ago I decided to create a tool that summarizes podcasts for me using an LLM. If I find the summary interesting enough or there is something that I want to learn about, I go and listen to the entire episode. Such a tool might be useful to others also, so I made a website for it - https://www.srenews.info.

I encourage you to listen to the complete episodes if you find a summary interesting - they are linked from each summary page.

Why should you monitor your third-party Cloud and SaaS vendors if you are in SRE/Ops?

As part of an SRE team, your primary responsibility is ensuring the reliability of your applications. What makes you responsible for monitoring services that you don't even manage? Third-party services are just like yours - with SLAs. And outages happen, affecting you as well as many others who depend on them.

It's a no-brainer that you should know when such outages happen to be on top of things if/when it affects your running applications.

Most of your third party dependencies will have a public status page or a Twitter account where they publish updates on their outages. Here are some seemingly easy ways to monitor these pages

• Subscribe to the RSS feed of these pages
• Follow the Twitter account
• Sign up for Slack, Email, SMS notifications on the status page itself if the page supports these