SRE Meet-up & Talks. October 18th

We'd like to welcome you to another SRE meet-up at Squarespace. We'll laugh, we'll cry, we'll learn that real treasure is the mistakes we made along the way. (Also, food, drink, and complaining about computers.)

This time we've talks from Laura Nolan and Murali Suriar on Load Balancing, and from Scott Jewloszewicz-Clarke on our adventures instrumenting third-party software with Prometheus.

Keeping the balance: load balancing demystified.

Can you explain the entire path that an IP packet takes from your users to your binary? What about a web request? Do you understand the tradeoffs that different kinds of load balancing techniques make? If not, this talk is for you.

Load balancing is hard, and it is made up of many disparate technologies. It cuts across network, transport and application layers. We'll describe different flavours of load balancing (network, naming, application) and how they work.

We will then discuss example use cases, and which load balancing approaches are most appropriate in each case. We'll also relate these to several design patterns for high-availability services that have developed over the years. Finally, we'll relate the techniques we've been discussing to well-known open source technologies and to the major cloud load balancing services.

Murali Suriar is a lapsed computer science graduate, turned network engineer, turned SRE. Currently working at Google running cluster filesystem and locking services. Left Google to get on a boat. Got bored and came back.

Laura Nolan's background is in Site Reliability Engineering, software engineering, distributed systems and computer science. She wrote the 'Managing Critical State' chapter in the O'Reilly ‘Site Reliability Engineering’ book, and is co-chair of SREcon18 Europe/Middle East/Africa. Laura is currently enjoying a well-earned sabbatical (and tinkering with some of her own projects) after 15 years in industry, most recently at Google.

Instrumenting Commercial Apps with Prometheus.

We will discuss our journey from basic push monitoring to a solid set of metrics pulled in from 3rd party apps through a prometheus stack. Covering the steps and miss-steps we took to get to a solid set of metrics and SLI's.

Scott Jewloszewicz-Clarke, SRE@Squarespace formerly of AirBnB and Google.

Registration:

For capacity planning reasons, you must RSVP in order to attend, and you must have a valid photo ID. We'll be accepting registrations until space fills.

The event will be held on Thursday October 18th at Squarespace Dublin's office which is located on Ship Street Great, Dublin 8. Doors open and food will be served at 6pm with the talks starting at 6.30pm.

Call for presentations:

Want to speak at a future event? Email tdeburca@squarespace.com with a proposed topic!