Slight Reliability

Hosted by Stephen Townshend

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Episodes

127

Latest episode

Aug 2026

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EN-NZ

About the show

Learning SRE, one day at a time.

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60 recent

August 11, 2026Episode 12535 min

Becoming a Better Leader with Helen Cuddy (Episode 125)

Send us Fan Mail How do you become an effective leader that gets the best out of people (and yourself)? This week I'm joined by technology leader Helen Cuddy to cover just this! We discuss... 🪴 Getting the best out of people 🤝 Building trust 🌌 How leadership differs depending on the org size 🤯 The need for good leadership even with smart engineers 🪞 The role of belief and self-perception ...and much more. You can find Helen on... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helencuddy/ In the episode we discuss DISC profiling: https://www.discprofile.com/what-is-disc We also discuss The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni https://www.tablegroup.com/topics-and-resources/teamwork-5-dysfunctions/ 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.com/c/SlightReliability Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

July 14, 2026Episode 12429 min

Effective Alerting with Krishna Vinnakota (Episode 124)

Send us Fan Mail How do you design, implement and evolve effective alerting of your services and systems? This week I'm joined by Krisha Vinnakota, Senior SRE @ Microsoft to dive into this topic. We cover... 👩‍💻 Treating your alerts like production code ✅The link between SLOs and alerting 🌡️ How do you decide what thresholds to set? 🔊 Signal to noise ratio and how to manage it 🐒 Chaos engineering and postmortems are levers to improve alerting ...and much more. You can find Krishna on... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krishna-vinnakota-8a03408/ 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.com/c/SlightReliability Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

May 21, 2026Episode 12327 min

The Trouble with Certificates with Charlie Al-Batty (Episode 123)

Send us Fan Mail 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 enabling us to become super developers 📜 The role of certifications in tech ...and much more. You can find Charlie on... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-al-batty-1895b911a/ His open source Azure SLO & SLI project "Azure SLO Guardian" can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/IamCharli01/Azure-SLO-Guardian/tree/main We also mentioned Ansible AWX on this episode: https://github.com/ansible/awx 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.com/c/SlightReliability Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

May 5, 2026Episode 12240 min

Being a Digital Nomad with Amin Astaneh (Episode 122)

Send us Fan Mail 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 the nomad lifestyle on relationships 🧸 Being woken up by a giant black bear ...and much more. You can find Amin on... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aminastaneh/ His website: https://certomodo.io/ and the Reliability Rebels podcast: https://podcast.certomodo.io/ Companies that Amin partners with... Nobl9 (SLOs as a service): https://www.nobl9.com/ LearnKube (Kubernes education): https://learnkube.com/ Amin also mentioned Go Fast Campers if you were interested (I have no partnership or even knowledge of this company, just putting it here in case anyone was interested in seeing what Amin's living space looks like): https://gofastcampers.com/ 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.com/c/SlightReliability Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

April 22, 2026Episode 12116 min

Four Golden Signals to Kickstart SRE (Episode 121)

Send us Fan Mail 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 processing context 📏 The power of tracking availability 🤷 Why SLOs can be challenging to kick off on day 1 🚪 An invitation to come on the podcast ...and much more. 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.com/c/SlightReliability Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

April 7, 2026Episode 12036 min

Staying Motivated as a Leader with Cads Oakley (Episode 120)

Send us Fan Mail 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 giving others permission to give it to you 💉 The role of dopamine 🤷 How much control do we really have in our work? ...and much more. You can find Cads on... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cadsoakley/ Website: https://aurelia.nz/ Content mentioned during the episode... Cads' article on the role of dopamine: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/managing-dopamine-mind-cædman-cads-oakley/ "Happy" by Derren Brown https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30142270-happy What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/1401301304 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.com/c/SlightReliability Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

March 24, 2026Episode 11925 min

A Beginner's Guide to SRE (Episode 119)

Send us Fan Mail 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/ You can read the Google SRE books for free online here: https://sre.google/books/ 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.com/c/SlightReliability Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

March 10, 2026Episode 11843 min

Freeing Observability Data Hostages with Jacob Leverich (Episode 118)

Send us Fan Mail 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 the evolution of telemetry storage and where it's going 💽 The advent of generic storage that handles metrics, logs, and traces well 🫶 Having empathy for people who need great observability but struggle to obtain it 🤲 Not holding telemetry data hostage ✍️ Lessons from 8 years of running a start-up ...and much more. You can find Jacob on... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-leverich/ And find out more about Observe here: https://www.observeinc.com/ In the episode Jacob referred to Google's Dremel analysis platform: https://research.google/pubs/dremel-interactive-analysis-of-web-scale-datasets-2/ And Apache Iceberg: https://iceberg.apache.org/ 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.com/c/SlightReliability Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

February 24, 2026Episode 11733 min

How to Change the World with Rob Roe (Episode 117)

Send us Fan Mail 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 interaction models ...and much more. You can find Rob on... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinsonroe/ References from the episode: Rob's YouTube channel "Unlocking Change": https://www.youtube.com/@unlockingchange Action Inquiry by Bill Torbert: https://gla.global/the-glp/action-inquiry/ Seven Transformations of Leadership: https://hbr.org/2005/04/seven-transformations-of-leadership Trademe Team Topologies case study: https://teamtopologies.com/industry-examples/trade-me-journey-towards-a-thinnest-viable-platform 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.com/c/SlightReliability Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

February 10, 2026Episode 11632 min

Human Software with Richard Bown (Episode 116)

Send us Fan Mail 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 thing you can't talk directly about the thing 🍃 Does change require senior leadership? Can it be grassroots? 🫂 The importance of looking after yourself at work 📗 The experience of publishing a novel ...and much more. You can find Richard's book "Human Software - A Life in I.T" here: https://humansoftwarebook.com/ ...and you can find Richard on... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-bown/ References from the episode (excluding some of the TV shows we mentioned): Rosegarden Linux music composition editing environment: https://www.rosegardenmusic.com/ Managing Humans by Michael Lopp: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/managing-humans-biting/9781430243144/ Rands leadership Slack: https://randsinrepose.com/welcome-to-rands-leadership-slack/ The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/113934.The_Goal Local Hero (1983): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085859/ Turn the Ship Around! by David Marquet: https://davidmarquet.com/books/turn-the-ship-around-book/ Scrivener (book writing tool): https://scrivener.app/ 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.com/c/SlightReliability Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre