Slight Reliability
Learning SRE, one day at a time.
Episodes
Why do some of the most mature organisations in the world still experience major incidents due to expired or incorrectly applied certificates?
This week I'm joined by SRE and DevOps expert Charlie Al-Batty to discuss this and many other things including...
☁︎ His open source project for native SLOs and SLIs in Azure
🔧Building tools and automation to solve problems
Dealing with alert fatigue
👾 AI ...
Can you combine your career with personal adventure? What would it be like to live in a truck and travel the country while working remotely?
This week I'm joined again by SRE & DevOps legend Amin Astaneh in one of the most human interviews I've ever done. We explore...
💉 The impact of the post-Covid layoffs
🛻 The logistics of living in a mobile home
💥 Staring a consultancy
❤️ The impact of...
When you first start implementing SRE it's a good idea to find early wins. Implementing monitoring of the four golden signals + availability is something I'm experimenting with at the moment to give our SRE team momentum and to pave the way for SLOs and more advanced observability.
In this solo episode I share my experiences, including...
💛 What are the four golden signals?
🦥 Observability in an async ...
As an engineer you get constant dopamine hits by solving technical problems. As a leader you're often working toward long term goals that span months or years. How do you stay motivated in that context?
This week I'm joined by technology leader and fellow Aucklander Cads Oakley. We cover...
🐆 Don't chase the result, harvest the learning
🏆 The payoff for being a leader
🎁 Giving feedback and gi...
This week I repurpose a talk I just did at the JuniorDev meetup in Auckland. If you're new to SRE or observability then this is the talk for you. For the more seasoned listeners, it's a chance to see how my perspective and understanding has changed over the years.
In the episode I refer to the This Is Fine! podcast on resilience engineering: https://www.thisisfinepod.com/
How do you ingest and store petabytes of telemetry every day in a cost effective and high performing way? How can you do this in a way which gives engineers the operational data they need to keep services running? How has this challenge be tackled in the past and what's been the evolution?
This week I'm joined by Observe co-founder Jacob Leverich to go deep into this topic. We discuss...
💾 A deep-dive into ...
How do you take all the utopian ideas you read about in books and apply them to the reality of the organisations we work in?
This week I'm joined by leader, mentor, and coach Rob Roe to tackle this question. We discuss...
🌪️ The pitfalls of functional silos
🤫 Is the annual budget a load of rubbish?
🍃 How our management promotion systems are often broken
🫂 The power of virtual teams
📗 Team int...
We spend a third of our life at work. It needs to be something we enjoy and something with purpose. Our work experience also impacts our family, friends, and our personal lives.
This week I'm joined by tech engineer, leader, and author Richard Bown to explore this and many other topics including...
🌪️ The difficulty in applying the ideas we read in books in real organisations
🤫 When you want to implement a ...
When you become a people leader there is no manual. How can we not only learn leadership skills but practice them and build leadership muscle?
This week I'm joined by Orion Group Limited co-founder Xiao Zhang to discuss...
👑 The challenge of transitioning into people leadership
💪 How we don't get fit by watching other people work out
⌚ Pausing as an act of active leadership
🌌 The power of slac...
This week I kick off the 2026 season with some news and we explore how to prepare for a new role.
You can buy Slight Reliability merch here (Note: you cannot order the mugs outside of New Zealand):
https://slightreliability.digitees.co.nz/
You can find Stephen on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.c...
From the day we invented computers we've been struggling to keep applications running and delivering services to the business. Is this latest wave of AI helping or hurting us?
This week I'm joined by Causely founder Shmuel Kliger to dive into...
🌊 The three waves of AI hype over the decades (the history of AI)
☠️ The dangers of over-promising and under-delivering what AI can do
🧠 What is causal rea...
What is operational intelligence and how is it different from observability or BI?
This week I'm joined by SquaredUp's VP of Innovation Adam Kinniburgh to answer that question and many more including...
❓ What is operational intelligence?
🙈 Relating observability back to customer, business, or revenue
😎 The value of giving stakeholders confidence
🌉 Who bridges the gap between tech and business...
How does leading platform teams differ from leading product teams?
This week I'm joined by experienced technology leader Dinesh Sukhija to answer that question and many more including...
❓ What is a platform team?
⚽ Coaching engineers to focus on outcomes
☀️ Connecting platform initiatives to business goals
✋ Identifying the limiters in your team
🎤 Spreading knowledge and avoiding single points o...
How has my first two years as a manager in tech been? What have I learned? What do I need to work on?
This week I share my experiences over the past couple of years. I cover:
🔥 My recent close call with burnout
🫶 How I attempted to build a team culture
💪 The importance of tough conversations
🥱 How roles and responsibilities might be boring to think about but is critical
❓ What's next?
...and mu...
How could AI help human beings negotiate the mountains of telemetry we collect to get simple and fast insight?
This week I'm joined by Ottermon AI CEO and founder Checo Pacheco about the lifecycle of observability coverage and tooling within organisations and how AI is helping to find signals amongst the noise and reduce cognitive load for SREs. We discuss...
🎂 The need for a layer of logic on top of our telemet...
What is chaos engineering and how is it being used in 2025?
This week I'm joined by Gremlin CEO and founder Kolton Andrus to discuss...
🌪️ What is chaos engineering and what is its origins?
🪴 How has it evolved over the year?
🤖 The role of AI agents in SRE work
💰 Justifying the value of chaos engineering
🏃♀️➡️ How do I get started?
...and much more.
You can find Kolton on:
LinkedIn: https://ww...
What are Team Topologies? How can they be used to deliver value simpler and more effectively (and in a more humane way)?
This week I'm joined by Luke McManus to discuss...
⛰️ What are the four team topologies?
🏆 Can we have too much collaboration?
⌚ Team interaction models
🌏 Cognitive load
🏃♀️➡️ Value dynamics mapping
...and much more.
You can find Luke on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/...
How do you begin contributing to an open source project? What's it like? What do you get out of it?
This week I'm joined by Wendy Ha who shares her unique story of joining the Kubernetes project and becoming a contributor. We explore...
⛰️ What it's like working on one of the biggest open source projects in the world
🏆 The benefits of contributing to open source
⌚ How much time and effort does ...
As an #SRE how do you influence senior leadership to get support and priority for the things you care about?
To answer this question I'm joined by Nora Jones, founder of Jeli and now Head of Pricing, Product Strategy and Growth at PagerDuty. Our conversation touches on...
🤝 How understanding needs to flow both ways (between engineers and leaders)
🎨 Reliability is as much an art as a science
📝 Using nap...
This week I do a retrospective on the Slight Reliability podcast.
👂 How many people listen to it?
❤️ How do I feel about the show?
🎉 What's going well?
🪴 What could be better?
❔ What's next for the show?
If you want to check out the podcast that came before Slight Reliability, you can find Performance Time archived on YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/@performance-time
You can find ...
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