SREcon22 Americas Call for Participation

Overview

SREcon22 Americas is the first of three global events in 2022, when we will finally have the opportunity to gather again in-person in several regions worldwide. We approach this first SREcon we'll have in-person as we find a new balance after the disruptions of COVID-19, many of which are ongoing. Our goal is to use this opportunity to bring us together and reflect on how scalable and reliable systems sustained our lives these past two years. Join us in showcasing how scaling expertise has paid off for teleconferencing, education, streaming entertainment, delivery services, telemedicine, and other unexpected demands.

We welcome submissions of talks on topics including but not limited to:

• Scaling with low or no physical presence
• Telemedicine implementation, especially regulatory compliance
• Remote education, especially around infrastructure
• How changes in spending affected your ability to build out and maintain your systems
• Impact on supply-chain systems

SRE as a practice (perhaps named differently) exists not only in technology-focused companies, but also in organizations of all sizes and backgrounds. Your insights will help create a meaningful, diverse, and inclusive program for SREcon22 Americas. Conversations are never complete when they focus just on successes; we encourage talks that focus on lessons learned from failures or hard problems.

We look forward to learning from new, as well as experienced speakers, across the SRE and systems engineering space. This year we particularly welcome new speakers; many of our best talks have come from people with new perspectives to share and 2021 most certainly has given us all new experiences and stories we can share and from which we can learn.

At every SREcon globally, we welcome and encourage participation from all individuals in any country, including people that are underrepresented in, or excluded from, technology, including but not limited to: people of all colors, women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, neurodiverse participants, students, veterans, and others with unique characteristics. Similarly, we welcome participants from diverse professional roles: QA testers, security teams, DBAs, network administrators, compliance experts, UX designers, government employees, and scientists. Regardless of who you are or the job title you hold, if you are a technologist who faces unique challenges and shares our areas of interest, we encourage you to be a part of SREcon22 Americas.

Proposals

• Talks
• 15-minute talks with 5 minutes for Q&A
• 30-minute talks with 10 minutes for Q&A
• Panels
• Discuss a specific topic and engage in a conversation with a small group in front of the attendees. Duration is flexible.

Suggested Topics

Systems Engineering Principles Track

Talks in this track should focus on providing a deeper understanding of how key technologies used in large-scale distributed systems work: their architecture, their strengths and their sharp edges, and new developments. These are the details you need when designing, supporting, and scaling your infrastructure. Talks that deal with applied theory (e.g., queueing theory, load balancing theory, consistency models) are particularly welcome.

For this track, we seek proposals on a number of topics, such as:

• Performance (e.g., OS features, hardware design, bottlenecks)
• Databases (e.g., how is data stored on disk in MySQL, PostgreSQL performance, consistency models)
• Observability (e.g., monitoring overview, events vs. metrics, whitebox vs. blackbox, visualizations, debugging, scaling your monitoring infrastructure)
• Distributed Systems (e.g., consistency and consensus, Hadoop, MapReduce, Jupyter Notebooks, Containers)
• Network (e.g., SD WAN, load balancing, DNS, IP protocols, layer 2 networks, BGP)
• Firmware (e.g., Open Source Firmware, UEFI)
• Security (e.g., TPMs, Hardware Security Modules, transport encryption, filesystem encryption, data management)

Scaling and Crisis Management Talks

• Talks centered around dealing with unplanned capacity constraints, scale, and latency impact
• Lessons from global outages that your service might have experienced, or systemic changes you implemented learning from others' outages

Panel Discussions

• Have you worked at an organization that dealt with unexpected scale during the pandemic (e.g., organizations that focused on food delivery, streaming, medical services, media, COVID-19 response work)? Create a discussion forum across different SRE teams in your organization to talk about the problems you faced and ways in which you dealt with them.
• Compare and contrast how SRE is practiced across different types of systems or technical domains. What are the nuances you have discovered or experienced? Invite key stakeholders from these systems to participate in a discussion.
• Tell us about a challenging incident that you have experienced and resolved. Bring some of your team members onto this panel and tell us the story about what happened and how the team coordinated, reacted to, and solved the problem.

Speaker Information

To see the details of what we want to know about your proposal to speak, we encourage you to visit the talks submission system.

Please note that we make use of a two-phase submission process: Phase 1 provides details needed for the program committee to pick the best content. Phase 2 is where you provide your personal information and the short description for the program agenda. Only accepted and waitlisted proposals will proceed through Phase 2; that information must be provided by December 29.

Both presenters and organizers may withdraw or decline proposals for any reason, even after initial acceptance. Speakers must submit their own proposals; third-party submissions, even if authorized, will be rejected.

If you have questions about this Call for Participation, feel free to drop us a message at srecon22americas_chairs@usenix.org. If you are a new presenter or would just like some extra help, please reach out. We can provide support via practice sessions.

Background

SREcon is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale. Our purpose is to be inclusive as we bring together ideas representative of our diverse community, whether its members are focusing on a global scale, launching new products and ideas for a small business, or pivoting their approach to unite software and systems engineering. SREcon challenges both those new to the profession as well as those who have been involved in SRE or related endeavors for years. The conference culture is built upon respectful collaboration amongst all participants in the community through critical thought, deep technical insights, continuous improvement, and innovation.

For more information on the themes and programs of past conferences, see the list of past conferences.