SREcon20 Asia/Pacific Call for Participation

SREcon20 Asia/Pacific will take place September 7–9, 2020, in Sydney, Australia.

Sponsored by USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association

Important Dates

  • Proposals for talks due: Monday, February 3, 2020, 23:59 UTC
  • Notification to talk presenters: Friday, February 28, 2020
  • Proposals for lightning talks: Mid-June 2020

Overview

For the fourth SREcon Asia/Pacific, we're diving deeper into all things data-related. Data is a critical component of serving systems which can be difficult to manage, monitor, and scale. We want to hear from SREs on how they manage state in their applications and data pipelines. For the platforms you use, how are the distributed systems which host and store the data architected to scale? What types of consistency models or consensus algorithms do you adopt and why? Is data quality a critical attribute to your service, and if so, how do you define and instrument SLOs that make sense to your business?

Please join us in creating an excellent program for SREcon Asia/Pacific, which will be the sixteenth SREcon event globally. In 2019, SREcon Asia/Pacific had over 530 attendees from over 120 companies, with backgrounds covering 24 countries spanning single-person startups, tech giants with tens of thousands of employees, and finance and enterprise sector companies adopting SRE for the first time. We look forward to growing SREcon Asia/Pacific in 2020 with even more representation from even more diverse organisations and backgrounds willing to share their knowledge and experience.

Proposals

We are looking for proposals in the following formats:

  • Talks:
    • 20-minute talk (plus an extra 5 minutes for Q&A)
    • 40-minute talk (plus an extra 5 minutes for Q&A)
  • Lightning Talks:
    • 5-minute talks

The deadline for talk proposals is Monday, February 3, 2020. We will accept proposals via the submission form. We'll evaluate all submissions and get back to you by Friday, February 28, 2020. We will have the option of practice sessions for presenters of 20- and 40-minute talks, regardless of experience. Details will be included in the acceptance notices. Accepted speakers will be required to confirm their plan to present along with their talk information by Monday, March 9, 2020.

Both presenters and organisers may withdraw or decline proposals for any reason, even after initial acceptance. Speakers must submit their own proposals; third-party submissions, even if authorised, will be rejected.

If you have questions about this Call for Participation, feel free to drop us a message at srecon20apac_chairs@usenix.org.

Suggested Topics

  • Experience of managing stateful services, as well as the associated challenges.
  • SLO instrumentation for data-centric services, including SLOs and error budgets for data quality and correctness.
  • Considerations and challenges when managing security-critical data systems.
  • Optimising data access patterns in Machine Learning applications.
  • Managing the reliability of services driven by ML models. How would you define reliability for such a service?
  • Engineering reliability through automation, monitoring, deployment, capacity planning, and validation, including automatically scaling to handle large traffic spikes.
  • How to embrace and support diversity in SRE, and how to cultivate, recruit, and retain SREs.
  • Any other topic under Computer Systems Engineering, SRE, Production Engineering, DevOps, and related fields that would be of interest to the SREcon audience.

Core Principles Track

We are continuing the Core Principles track introduced in 2019. Talks in this track will focus on providing a deep understanding of how technologies we use every day function, and why it's important to know these details when supporting and scaling your infrastructure.

For this track we're looking for a number of topics, such as:

  • Databases (e.g., sharding, indices)
  • Observability (e.g., monitoring overview, events vs. metrics, whitebox vs. blackbox, visualizations)
  • Big Data (e.g., Hadoop, Elasticsearch)
  • Network (e.g., protocols, HTTP routing, load balancing)
  • Languages and performance (e.g., avoiding bottlenecks, tuning, debugging)

Background (Overarching Goals of the Global SREcon Conferences)

SREcon is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale. Our purpose is to be inclusive as we bring together ideas representative of our diverse community, whether its members are focusing on a global scale, launching new products and ideas for a small business, or pivoting their approach to unite software and systems engineering. SREcon challenges both those new to the profession as well as those who have been involved in SRE or related endeavors for years. The conference culture is built upon respectful collaboration amongst all participants in the community through critical thought, deep technical insights, continuous improvement, and innovation.

For more information on the themes and programs of past conferences, see the list of past conferences.

Conference Organizers