SREcon17 Europe/Middle East/Africa Call for Participation

Important Dates

  • Proposal submission deadline: Wednesday, April 12, 2017, 23:59 UTC
  • Notification to talks presenters: Wednesday, May 24, 2017
  • Lightning talks proposal submission deadline: Sunday, July 30, 2017
  • Notification to lightning talks presenters: Sunday, August 13, 2017

Conference Organizers

Overview

SREcon17 Europe/Middle East/Africa invites talks on all technical aspects of design and operation of highly reliable systems at scale, as well as SRE philosophy, leadership, hiring, and training. Talks may present a team’s experience with new ideas or technology, or describe current best practices and the state of the art. The conference welcomes participants from small as well as large SRE organisations, and from new SRE teams as well as more established teams.

In 2017 our themes are SRE psychology and SRE antipatterns.

Psychological challenges SREs face include avoiding burnout while balancing many competing priorities and remaining motivated in a world that praises new features, but rarely celebrates the avoidance of outages or a reduction in manual effort required to run a service. Like all humans, SREs are subject to cognitive biases that affect our judgment—how do we mitigate their effect in a profession where making accurate and timely decisions is critical?

A core value of SRE is to examine failures in order to learn. In this spirit, we’d like to invite talks on antipatterns in SRE. Topics could range from antipatterns in specific technical areas such as alerting or automation, to organisational antipatterns.

Submissions do not need to be directly related to the themes. Submissions on any topic related to Site Reliability Engineering are welcome, including but not limited to:

  • Robust and innovative solutions to systems engineering problems
  • Small SRE organisations, and starting new SRE teams
  • Monitoring, alerting, and SLOs
  • Load balancing and loadshedding
  • Automation, deployment, and release management
  • Measuring and systematically fixing risk, including unknowns and technical debt
  • Disaster preparedness and recovery from disasters big and small
  • Cloud and SaaS migrations: when to outsource parts of your stack and when/how to monitor and debug end to end
  • Extending SRE culture to networking, security, privacy, and other facets of technology
  • Culture/people
    • Diversity and inclusion
    • How to cultivate, recruit, and retain SREs
    • Catalyzing great SRE teams with a mixture of roles such as project manager, tech writer, UX designer
    • Getting other parts of your organisation to buy in to SRE principles
  • Incident management and postmortems
  • Launch management
  • Capacity planning
  • Techniques and tools for troubleshooting and debugging

Proposal Formats and Key Dates

We are looking for proposals in the following formats:

  • Talks:
    • 20-minute talks with 5 minutes for Q&A, and
    • 45-minute talks with 10 minutes for Q&A
    • 5-minute lightning talks
  • Workshops: Half-day workshops that focus on skill development or deeper understanding of a given area, rather than being a tutorial session on using a specific tool.
  • Panels or unconference sessions: suggested topics for panels or unconference sessions.

If you have a topic suggestion or request for a particular speaker you really would like to see at the conference, feel free to drop us a message at srecon17europe_chairs@usenix.org.

We will accept proposals until April 12, 2017, via the Web submission form. We’ll evaluate those and get back to you by May 24, 2017. Accepted speakers will be required to confirm their plan to present along with their talk information by June 2, 2017.

Lightning talk proposals will be accepted until July 30, 2017, with notification for accepted talks two weeks later.

Because panels can be challenging to organise well, the program committee will provide some additional guidance for any accepted panel sessions.

Proposal Guidelines

See the Proposal Guidelines page for information and advice on how to submit your proposal to SREcon17 Europe/Middle East/Africa.