SREcon26 Europe/Middle East/Africa Call for Participation

Overview

This year, we ask: how can different perspectives on Site Reliability Engineering better inform our work? Our community benefits from a wide range of industries, roles, sizes, budgets, regulations, risk aversion, and SRE adoption. Considering different perspectives, what can we learn from organisations both similar and dissimilar to our own?

The largest tech companies, with mature SRE teams, still face challenges of staffing, scaling, and capacity, which small and nimble places avoid; how does this agility benefit reliability? For established organisations, how could your reliability roadmap have been smoother in hindsight? For startups, what are the benefits of these greenfield design choices? We welcome talks that both share your perspective and also contrast that against the challenges and opportunities from other approaches.

Talks on established SRE topics are always welcome, and the prompts that follow will hopefully spark ideas, but are by no means exhaustive.

Suggested Topics

• Supply chain constraints
• With storage and memory costs rising by double-digits each quarter, how does this shift the landscape for prioritization?
• What optimizations are now achievable that were previously "too cheap" to worry about?
• Is it a long way down from the local maxima? When circumstances force re-examination, what's the endgame?
• How can we preserve reliability without getting all the resources we need?
• SRE direction/existential reflections
• Where have you been/where are you/where are you going, considering your organisation's SRE adoption?
• Futureologists, what are your predictions?
• Are you or your team more reliable than a year ago? How can we tell?
• The human factor
• In 2026, do SREs feel safe, empowered, curious, engaged, aligned, and passionate about their work? What are some good examples and counterexamples?
• In our field, considering these aspects, what risks are increasing/diminishing over time?
• How does AI help as a force multiplier? Is it making us productive or redundant?
• AI everywhere
• In the fast-paced atmosphere of AIops development and deployment, what stage are we at?
• How does the emergence of AIops overlap with and contribute to SRE, at a high level and/or in day-to-day operations?
• What are the tradeoffs of build-vs-buy for AI assistants? In what use cases does custom development on top of an LLM make the most sense?
• To what extent is reskilling a concern?
• For those involved in running training or inference at large scale, how is that shaping up in 2026?
• Dealing with uncertainty
• What opportunities does uncertainty afford? Are there any upsides?
• What impacts are regulatory/policy shifts creating?
• Are there examples of sudden or surprise external factors that left you scrambling?
• Have you found yourself doing more scenario planning?
• SREcon favourites
  These topics, featured in previous conferences, are still welcome for both returning and new audiences
• Automation/toil reduction
• Troubleshooting/metrics/alerting
• Oncall/incident management
• Software engineering for reliability
• Postmortems/war stories
• Retrofitting SRE within an organisation/SRE journey

Systems Engineering and Principles

This track is dedicated to exploring and explaining the technical underpinnings of the systems and infrastructure with which we work. Talks on these subjects should focus on providing a deeper understanding of how key technologies used in large-scale distributed systems work: their architecture, their strengths and their sharp edges, and new developments. These are the details needed when designing, supporting, and scaling your infrastructure. Talks that deal with applying theory to practice are particularly welcome.

We invite proposals on a number of topics such as:

• Performance: OS-level techniques for optimization, overcoming bottlenecks, performance measurement, performance topics related to common systems SREs use
• Databases: deep-dives on your DBMS of choice, new databases for emerging data types and use cases relevant to SREs
• Observability: building and scaling infrastructure for monitoring, understanding events vs. metrics, visualizations, systems to support debugging at scale, OpenTelemetry
• Distributed Systems: consistency and consensus, Kafka and other distributed logs, distributed applied use of Big Data tools in a SRE or business context
• Networking: New approaches to getting traffic to your application, across all layers of the OSI model
• Security: SREs often end up working on platform security. What novel approaches to securing data at rest, in use, and in transit have you encountered?

Information for Speakers

Talks are offered in short/long slots:

• 15-minute talks followed by 5 minutes for Q&A
• 35-minute talks followed by 10 minutes for Q&A

To see the details of what we need to know about your proposal, please sign up to the talks submission system.

If you are a new presenter or would just like some extra help with your proposal, please reach out. We can also provide support via practice sessions.

Presenters or organizers may withdraw or decline proposals for any reason, even after initial acceptance. Speakers must submit their own proposals; third-party submissions, even if authorized, will be rejected.

SREcon26 EMEA will be held in Dublin, Ireland, and all presentations will require in-person participation.

If you have questions about this Call for Participation, please get in touch at [email protected].

Who participates in SREcon?

SREcon participants come from a wide variety of backgrounds: small startups, tech giants with tens of thousands of employees, finance, and enterprise sector companies adopting or expanding SRE in their organisations, and academia. New speakers are encouraged to submit talks; many of our best talks have come from people with new perspectives to share.

We welcome and encourage participation from all individuals in any country. We also welcome participants from diverse professional roles: QA testers, customer experience/support, security teams, DBAs, network administrators, compliance experts, UX designers, health care professionals, scientists, and economists. 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 SREcon26 Europe/Middle East/Africa.

Enduring goals of SREcon worldwide

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.