Topics discussed:
For an SRE team to take on a new system, what docs are needed? What have you seen work well?
- often when things go wrong its because something was "left out" of the mental model. what do you like to have written down? what works?
- architecture overview, system context, flows / user journeys. what should i be measuring?
- biz usage? what is it *doing*, what users.
- show your incidents / postmortems. learn from your mistakes!
- learning from incidents (not "about")
- docs get stale!
- dashboards, when were they "true" ?
- slack! zoom back over history
- But be wary about Slack retention period! Slack messages / thread should be ported out to an Incident Management Document about the outage
- depends on your org structure, existing norms. (eg existing SRE team vs single NOC)

Reliability vs cost - what is your org doing right now?
- cost vs price as compared to revenue/profit. hard questions!
- what about the "left" side? (Dev) also? consistent, clear direction and tradeoffs.
- "how reliable does the service need to be to be competitive?”
- “How much un-reliability can we accept with the current design?”
- “How much are we willing to spend to achieve those goals"
- consider criticality of systems, "what can we downscale?" (at what price)
- people vs infra costs aren't always super rational :(

incident meta analysis
- digging through looking for patterns, howto?
- LFI - "just ask people" ! -- beware greenwashing (dont want to write it down). but they'll tell you in real world.
- beware losing the details when distilling down to metrics! need a story not a number.
- https://robm.me.uk/2021/04/thermocline-of-truth/ 
- "ICD for IT" - helping to diagnose common failure modes?
- https://www.who.int/standards/classifications/classification-of-diseases 
- incident metrics for a service as just another source of metrics for that service.
- cite https://www.verica.io/blog/mttr-is-a-misleading-metric-now-what/
- https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/sre.google/en//static/pdf/IncidentMeticsInSre.pdf 

What are some new technologies you're working with and what problem are they solving for you?
- OpenTF ;)
- golang
- chaos engineering books
- https://github.com/dastergon/awesome-sre 
- look into MLOps also!
- consider emphasis on speed and domain changes vs infra/scaling changes over time. (early vs late product) 
- troubleshooting methods? "whats changed?" -- runwhen.com 
- common tools against custom apps is hard. determining what the consequences of a metric
- without a lot of context is really difficult.

Who's going to SRECon EMEA?
- October in Dublin 
- https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon23emea 
- SREmuc Meetup Munich next Tuesday

how are you using LLMs today? (for r9y stuff)
- generalize the point that im making, when communicating what has happened, etc.
- give me ideas, be creative. helps me try not to be biased. shows my biases or things ive ignored. using it to search and discover.
- i have seen quite a few companies were the Ops team is using ChatGPT to look for solutions. Some have created bots to automate this.
- And yes, very concerned about the impact (enterprise, truuth, securitym etc)
- someone to talk to (rubber duck!)
- https://ubisglobal.com/blog/get-a-rubber-duck-how-to-make-your-study-time-more-effective/ 
- LLM as pair programmer, help improve in ways i wouldnt have been able to on my own.

Is Google getting rid of SRE?
- trite: no
- longer: SRE is always evolving
- principles vs practice always changing, different groups do it in different ways. even within google

Chat log:
Are there similar meetups like this?
The more the merrier
not a lot! there should be more :)
this is my first, but...yes. ;) there's a good devops oriented lean coffee every friday at 11am ET
Send a link over ;)
and there's a cto-coffee and fractional cto-coffee that are pretty well attended.
https://www.meetup.com/seattle-coffeeops/events/295847219/
it's PNW heavy but not exclusive
is this discord URL on the r9y.dev site ?
https://r9y.dev/chat
https://bit.ly/r9y-coffee
SRE was *born* of cost optimization!
I find three questions that are useful when talking about reliability is: "how reliable does the service need to be to be competitive?” “How much un-reliability can we accept with the current design?” “How much are we willing to spend to achieve those goals"
hot take: was SRE adoption a zero interest rate phenomenon?
Unplanned maintenance windows
Incidents never go out of fashion though!
Here's how Shopify Dev ops uses Slack for escalations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYhS3gCINGs
The Slack channel becomes your documentation
I had not considered Slack for this. Interesting!
(can't comment on coffee) docs as cache of knowledge. known issues that haven't been fixed yet. this knowledge is always expiring.
note that arch diagrams can expire!
https://robm.me.uk/2021/04/thermocline-of-truth/ !
Anyone have opinions on this book? https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/reliable-machine-learning/9781098106218/?_gl=1*1381mp2*_ga*MTI0NDM4MTczMC4xNjk1MTQzNDg1*_ga_092EL089CH*MTY5NTE0MzQ4NS4xLjEuMTY5NTE0MzQ5MS41NC4wLjA.
i.e. who cares if the queue is getting a bit long if people aren't complaining about it
Worth a read of Dr Laura's article: https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/seeing-sre - tooling covers the "Techne" i.e. high level abstract knowledge, but not the "Metis" - contextual knowledge
"who cares if the queue is getting a bit long if people aren't complaining about it" -- you wouldn't alert on it, but it might be a valuable clue when you are investigating an incident.
i have seen quite a few companies were the Ops team is using ChatGPT to look for solutions. Some have created bots to automate this.
And yes, very concerned about the impact (enterprise, truuth, securitym etc)
FYI https://ubisglobal.com/blog/get-a-rubber-duck-how-to-make-your-study-time-more-effective/
https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon23emea
10–12 October, 2023
DORA COMMUNITY SUMMIT!!! October 2 in Las Vegas.
dora.community/summit
https://itrevolution.com/product/devops-enterprise-summit-las-vegas-2023/
Always be learning!