SREcon22 Asia/Pacific Call for Participation

Overview

SREcon22 APAC is the last of the three regional SREcon events in 2022, where we will finally have the opportunity to gather again in person. It also is the first SREcon in Asia/Pacific since June 2019. We are all striving to find a new balance after the disruptions of COVID-19, and look forward to hearing how your teams have adapted.

In 2019, SREcon Asia/Pacific was hosted in Singapore and had over 530 attendees from over 120 companies, covering 24 countries and ranging from 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 introducing the event to Australia for the first time, gathering together to reflect on how scalable and reliable systems have sustained our lives these past two years. Join us in showcasing how expertise in scaling has paid off for virtual collaboration, education, streaming entertainment, delivery services, telemedicine, and even the usual demands.

SRE as a practice (though perhaps named differently) exists not only in technology-focused companies, but also in organisations of all sizes and backgrounds. Your insights will help create a relevant, diverse, and inclusive program for SREcon22 APAC. Conversations are never complete when they focus just on successes; we encourage talks that focus on lessons learned from failures or hard problems.

We look forward to learning from speakers across the SRE and systems engineering space. This year we particularly welcome new speakers; many of our best talks have come from people with new perspectives to share and the last few years most certainly has given us all new experiences and stories we can share and from which we can learn.

At every SREcon globally, we welcome and encourage participation from all individuals in any country, including people that are underrepresented in, or excluded from, technology, including but not limited to: people of all colours, women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, neurodiverse participants, students, veterans, and others with unique characteristics. Similarly, we welcome participants from diverse professional roles: QA testers, security teams, DBAs, network administrators, compliance experts, UX designers, government employees, and data scientists. Regardless of who you are or the job title you hold, if you are a technologist who faces unique challenges and shares our areas of interest, we encourage you to be a part of SREcon22 Asia/Pacific.

Proposals

We are looking for proposals in the following formats:

• 20-minute talk
• 40-minute talk

Note that 20 minute talks will have an additional 5 minutes for Q&A after the talk and 45 minute talks will have 10 minutes for Q&A after the talk.

Attendee safety requires that we avoid workshops, lightning talks, and panel sessions for this conference.

Suggested Topics

This SREcon will be single-track, covering a wide spectrum of topics previously separated into Core Principles and Systems Engineering tracks. We would love to hear of talks on the uniqueness of SRE and our SRE community in the Asia-Pacific region. We also welcome topics on crisis management as it relates to our fields in the last two years.

SRE Practice and Culture

• How do you know when you’re doing SRE?
• Broadening our SRE community
• Psychology of team culture and connections
• Collaborating within global teams
• Safety Science and crossover into other vocations
• Analytical methods in the pursuit of efficient reliability work

Systems Engineering, Technical Principles

• Performance and Efficiency
• Inclusion of ecological factors into systems architecture
• Adapting to geography and culture: latency, data sovereignty, and localisation
• Capacity Planning and Economics
• Observability, Monitoring, Alerting
• Change Management
• Security
• Incident response and Crisis Management

Speaker Information

To see the details of what we want to know about your proposal to speak, we encourage you to visit the talks submission system.

Please note that we make use of a two-phase submission process: Phase 1 provides details needed for the program committee to pick the best content. Phase 2 is where you provide your personal information and the short description for the program agenda. Only accepted and waitlisted proposals will proceed through Phase 2; that information must be provided by October 5 along with your commitment to present.

If you are a new presenter or would just like some extra help, please reach out. We can provide support via practice sessions, review of your pre-recorded videos, and a helpful guide on how to record your presentation to get the best results possible.

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.

SREcon22 Asia/Pacific is scheduled to be held in Sydney. We will consider talks from remote-only presenters but strongly encourage in-person participation at the conference. Since health restrictions are likely to change between the time of this CFP and the actual conference, we will adjust the requirements as the situation evolves.

If you have questions about this Call for Participation, feel free to drop us a message at srecon22apac_chairs@usenix.org.

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.