SREcon

SREcon
Name	SREcon
Genre	Technical conference
Discipline	Site reliability engineering
First	2014
Frequency	Biennial/annual regional
Organizer	USENIX Association

SREcon

SREcon is a professional technical conference series focused on site reliability engineering and operations, organized by the USENIX Association. The series gathers engineers, managers, researchers, and practitioners from companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft Corporation, Amazon (company), and Netflix to discuss production systems, incident response, observability, and automation. Sessions often bridge topics found in events like Black Hat (conference), DEF CON, ACM SIGCOMM, Chaos Communications Congress, and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon.

Overview

SREcon centers on pragmatic engineering practices used in running large-scale infrastructure by participants from LinkedIn Corporation, Twitter, Inc., Dropbox, Inc., Airbnb, Inc., Spotify Technology S.A., Apple Inc., Pinterest, Uber Technologies, Inc., and Stripe, Inc.. The program emphasizes real-world case studies, postmortems, tooling, and standards discussed alongside stakeholders from IETF, IEEE, ACM, OpenTelemetry, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Attendees include representatives from NASA, European Space Agency, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase who apply reliability practices to critical systems. The conference’s pedagogical aims align with curricula used by Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and Carnegie Mellon University in courses on distributed systems.

History and Evolution

SREcon originated under the stewardship of the USENIX Association in the 2010s as site reliability engineering matured from practices at Google and Borg (software)-era projects to a broader profession. Early speakers included engineers affiliated with Baidu, Yandex, Microsoft Research, Intel Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., and Oracle Corporation. Over time the series incorporated lessons from incidents publicized in reports by organizations such as Equifax, Target Corporation (retailer), British Airways, and Sony Pictures Entertainment. The evolution of topics mirrored advances in technologies developed by teams at Red Hat, Canonical (company), HashiCorp, Chef (company), Puppet (software), and Ansible (software). SREcon’s growth tracked parallel developments visible at conferences like USENIX LISA, EuroSys, SOSP, and OSDI.

Conference Format and Programming

The program typically includes keynote talks, technical sessions, tutorials, lightning talks, panels, and birds-of-a-feather meetings featuring contributors from Google Scholar, ArXiv, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, and practitioners connected to projects like Kubernetes, Docker (software), Prometheus (monitoring), OpenStack, Envoy (software), Istio (service mesh), Fluentd, and Jaeger (software). Workshops often cover incident response methodologies used by teams at Morgan Stanley, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, Accenture, and Capgemini. Programming committees have included members from MITRE Corporation, SANS Institute, CERT Coordination Center, and NIST to align practices with broader operational security and resilience frameworks.

Organizers and Sponsorship

The series is organized by the USENIX Association, with sponsorship from technology companies and research labs including Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM Research, VMware, Inc., Salesforce, Cloudflare, Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, and Elastic (company). Nonprofit and standards organizations that have supported the event include Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Open Source Initiative, and Electronic Frontier Foundation. Academic partnerships have linked SREcon with institutions such as University of California, Berkeley, University of Cambridge, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Tsinghua University.

Attendance and Community

Attendees typically include site reliability engineers, systems administrators, software engineers, incident commanders, and platform engineers from companies like LinkedIn, Salesforce, Shopify, Atlassian, Slack (software) and GitHub. Community activities extend to mentorship programs, local chapters, and meetups coordinated with groups such as Meetup (website), DevOpsDays, Women Who Code, TechWomen, and Grace Hopper Celebration participants. The conference cultivates networks that interact with standards and policy forums including IETF working groups, W3C, and regional bodies like the European Commission technology units.

Notable Presentations and Impact

Notable presentations have included postmortems and technical retrospectives from incidents at Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Cloudflare, GitLab, Atlassian, Etsy, Inc., Basecamp, and Heroku (company). Influential talks have shaped practices adopted by organizations such as NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, United States Postal Service, General Electric, Siemens, and Boeing for operational resilience. Techniques presented have influenced tooling and standards implemented by projects like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana Labs, Thanos (software), and VictoriaMetrics. Papers and slides from the conference are frequently cited alongside work published in ACM SIGOPS, USENIX, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, and Communications of the ACM.

Locations and Frequency

SREcon events are held in regional iterations across North America, Europe, Asia, and other regions, with past venues in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, Toronto, and Dublin. Scheduling has included annual and biennial cadences, often timed near other industry gatherings like OSCON, Strata Data Conference, and Velocity Conference. Regional editions enable participation from local organizations including Deutsche Telekom, Orange S.A., NTT Communications, Telstra, and Vodafone.

Category:Technology conferences