SREcon19 Europe/Middle East/Africa Call for Participation

Overview

This year, SREcon EMEA will focus on unanswered questions in SRE. We want to discuss the problems no one is talking about, the problems everyone complains about with no real consensus on how to solve them. If you think there is an elephant in the room that we, the SRE community, have failed to talk about—come and tell us about it!

Please join us in creating an excellent program for our fifth year of SREcon Europe/Middle East/Africa, which will be the fourteenth SREcon event globally. In 2018, we had over 600 attendees from over 230 companies, with backgrounds ranging from small startups, through tech giants with tens of thousands of employees, to finance and enterprise sector companies adopting or expanding SRE in their organizations, to academia. New speakers are encouraged to submit talks; many of our best talks have come from people with new experiences to share.

Proposals

We are looking for proposals in the following formats:

• Talks:
• 20-minute talks with 5 minutes for Q&A
• 35-minute talks with 5 minutes for Q&A
• Workshops:
• Speakers are invited to submit workshops ranging in subject matter from introductions to deep dives. Please specify what technical level your workshop is targeted at.
• Lightning talks
• 5 minute talks
• We will accept lightning talk proposals until August 22, 2019, via the submission form.

The deadline for talk and workshop proposals is has been extended to May 21, 2019. We will accept proposals via the submission form. We'll evaluate all submissions and get back to you by June 17, 2019. Accepted speakers will be required to confirm their plan to present along with their presentation information by June 25, 2019.

We will schedule practice sessions for all presenters, regardless of experience, because they help speakers adapt their message to our audience and improve the experience for attendees. Along with confirming their plan to present, speakers agree to participate in the practice sessions (details will be included in the acceptance notices).

Both presenters and 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.

If you have questions about this Call for Participation, feel free to email us at srecon19europe_chairs@usenix.org.

Suggested Topics

Unsolved/Open Problems in SRE

• Should developers be oncall? Does being an SRE always mean being oncall?
• Does every company need SRE? What does the sole SRE at a company do? Are there organisations without a need for SRE?
• What do SLIs look like for things that aren't stateless webapps?
• What does the rise of cloud providers and technologies mean for SRE?
• How do you SRE services where you don't have access to the code or can't make changes to it?

Core Principles Track

This year we are introducing a Core Principles track. Talks in this track will focus on providing a deep understanding of how technologies we use everyday 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. how is data stored on disk in MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.?)
• Observability (e.g. monitoring overview, events vs. metrics, whitebox vs. blackbox, visualizations, etc.)
• Data Infrastructure (e.g. how does Hadoop work? What is MapReduce?)
• Distributed Systems (e.g. consistency and consensus)
• Network (e.g. HTTP routing and load balancing)
• Languages and performance (e.g. debugging systems with GDB)

Background (Overarching Goals of All 3 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.