Sally Roth

SRE Lab

Small, working tools and explainers for reliability engineering: setting reliability targets, knowing when something is really broken, learning from the failures that keep coming back, and how Kubernetes and Linux actually work, including what breaks at scale. More on the way: incident management, cardinality, delivery, observability, security, Terraform, and the same patterns in Python, Go and Ruby.

SLO Burn SimulatorSee how fast an error budget drains, which burn-rate alerts fire and when, and get matching Prometheus rules. Down or MeUptime checks with an AI classifier that decides whether a failure is real, and only alerts when it's sure. The Incident Files310 real postmortems, searchable by failure mode, plus the nine failure patterns that keep coming back and how companies warded them off. Kubernetes, DrawnHow Kubernetes works in 18 step-through diagrams, from kubectl apply to DNS, storage and upgrades, each with a 30-second answer, gotchas, a quiz and what breaks at scale. Linux, DrawnWhat a Linux node really does with memory and packets: page cache, the OOM killer, cgroups, a packet's path, conntrack, TCP queues and the first 60 seconds of performance analysis.

Still growing

Sprouting nowSane Incident ManagementSeverity, roles, the incident lifecycle, communication, on-call, blameless reviews, action items and readiness.

Sprouting nowTaming CardinalityHow one innocent label multiplies time series and cost, how Prometheus stores them, and how to keep metrics useful without the bill.

Sprouting nowDelivery, DrawnCI pipelines, artifact promotion, GitOps with Argo CD, canaries, feature flags, safe migrations and supply-chain security.

Sprouting nowObservability, DrawnOpenTelemetry and the Collector, Prometheus and PromQL, tracing and sampling, logs, and alerting that wakes the right person.

Sprouting nowSecurity for SREs, DrawnHow AWS decides allow or deny, TLS and mTLS, secrets, network segmentation, least privilege and audit trails.

Sprouting nowTerraform, Five Years OnMoved, import and removed blocks, checks and tests, the license change and OpenTofu, ephemeral values, and Stacks.

Sprouting nowOne Pattern, Three LanguagesRetries, timeouts, bounded concurrency, error handling, graceful shutdown and circuit breakers, side by side in Python, Go and Ruby.