Ask-Me-Anything Engineering

;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution

For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.

Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.

As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.

Small organizations are the reality for a number of people doing operations. Despite that, there are limited resources on the subject of working in a systems team of a few engineers. On the contrary, there is literature on how large organizations implement SRE, how they got to 99.999% availability, and how to process millions of metrics per second. Those are really good and interesting reads, but I have been in the shoes of a person reading such articles and thinking, "I enjoyed reading this, but I can't use it." For the purpose of this article, the terms "small organizations/companies" but also "small-scale" will be used to describe organizations and startups where there is a single SRE or a small team of SREs.

Download Article:

Ask-Me-Anything Engineering (PDF)

Article Section:

SRE AND SYSADMIN