Spontaneous swarming of responders might seem like a nuisance that breaks our tidy mental models of incident response, but it’s actually very powerful. It’s something to facilitate and encourage, not simply tolerate.

  Brent Chapman

The misconception is that the local assurances automatically combine to form a single end-to-end promise that spans brokers, processors, databases, outboxes, caches, webhooks, and external APIs.

   Irullappan irulandi — DZone

When a firmware issue caused reboots for firmware upgrades to take four hours(!), they had to find a solution.

  Giovanni Pereira Zantedeschi, Nnamdi Ajah, and Omar Sheik-Omar — Cloudflare

This one strikes a balance on AI that really speaks to me.

If you’re the one left holding the bag, you should generally get final say over what goes in that bag.

  Charity Majors

How Airbnb built a Kubernetes sidecar to deliver dynamic configuration reliably at scale.

  Bo Teng — Airbnb

In this post, we’ll walk through how we redesigned our Kubernetes-based PostgreSQL clusters for failover safety, how we balanced durability against latency, and what we learned while validating this approach through benchmarking and failure testing.

  Shree Sampath — Datadog

The failure mode on this one is really interesting, and the bit about “infinite blast radius” caught my eye.

  Sarat Mahavratayajula ,Vijay Sagar Gullapalli — VentureBeat

I’m enjoying this series so far, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest. It’s worth starting at part 1, but part 2 can stand on its own in a pinch.

  Uwe Friedrichsen

We build our systems against the usage patterns of human users, but agents fundamentally change the game.

   Vineet Bhatkoti — DZone

This is an interesting lens for exploring the risks that agents can introduce.

  Sayali Patil — VentureBeat

Great discussion in the comments! There’s a lot of variance in how much time people recommend. I personally tend to lean earlier — on-call is a great way to learn, and I can always reach out if I get stuck.

  u/modern_medicine_isnt and commenters — Reddit r/sre

A great into to the concept of metastable failures — and I recommend reading the original paper as well.

  Teiva Harsanyi

The real issue is that your company has made declaring an incident costly and risky for the person who does it.

  Brent Chapman

I enjoyed learning about their deliberate architectural choice to keep their central service in a single AZ. This incident highlighted a need for a fast failover plan.

  Coinbase

I like the balance between ensuring 99.99% reliability and designing their product to encourage customers to use their platform in a way that effectively manages the 0.01% case.

Reliability is a customer experience problem

  Mike Fisher — incident.io

I’m not gonna spoil this one for you by writing a summary. Just read it, trust me.

  Lorin Hochstein

They give solid examples to argue that much of the learning happens during the process of writing a post-incident review.

[…] you could throw the post-incident review document away after writing it and still get the vast majority of the value out of the process.

  Brent Chapman

I really like this idea of change absorption capacity.

  Priya Gopalsamy — Stack Overflow

A useful guide that covers strategies for benchmarking, along with pitfalls to avoid.

  Ben Dicken — PlanetScale

Serverless isn’t inherently cheaper. Hidden costs add up, and at scale it’s often pricier than containers — best for sporadic, not steady workloads.

   David Iyanu Jonathan — DZone

With just under 4.5 minutes of leeway for outages per month, you have to rely on automated remediation. AI can help, but it’s not a full solution, per this article.

  Norberto Lopes — incident.io

LLMs are specifically designed to generate plausible-seeming output, and this makes reviewing especially difficult.

  Diomidis Spinellis

A breakdown of the 28-hour aws us-east-1 outage in may 2026. What caused it, what went down, and what it means for how you design your infrastructure.

  Alon Shrestha

This article has a list of common problems in incident response, and I feel like printing it and taping it to my wall.

  Karan Nagarajagowda — Uptime Labs

This article gives you the failure data, cost data, and risk picture you need to make an accurate decision about AI SRE adoption.

  James A. Wondrasek — softwareseni

The blind spot isn’t delivery, its legibility: DORA measures work flowing through the pipe, not whether anyone can explain what’s in it.

  Paul LaPosta — LeadDev

But what happens when your observability stack is dependent on the same systems that are failing? In that moment, the dashboards go dark, alerts stop firing, and the tools meant to guide recovery become part of the outage.

  Abdurrahman J. Allawala — Airbnb

A thoughtful analysis of GitHub’s availability trouble of late, including some excellent reporting work to get more details on a growth graph previously shared by GitHub.

  Gergely Orosz — The Pragmatic Engineer

Here’s a good one introducing the concept of distancing through differencing.

By focusing on the differences, they see no lessons for their own operation and practices.

  Lorin Hochstein

In this post, we’ll peek behind the curtain and see how one seemingly innocuous change overwhelmed a system multiple hops away and how our not-fun afternoon helped us improve Discord.

  Discord

Oof. GCP suspended their account “as part of an automated action”, killing production.

This may sound familiar, because GCP did something very similar almost exactly 2 years ago.

  Chandrika Khanduri & Cody De Arkland — Railway

What a story! They discovered that they had inadvertently installed a quite harmful agent ruleset. Before you dismiss this by thinking “I’d never do that”, go back up and read Lorin Hochstein’s article above.

  u/dvrkstar — r/bard (Reddit)

There’s some great advice in here. My favorite: be explicit about choosing or not choosing to do something.

  incident.io

Live video delivery is an intensely reliability-critical endeavor, and Netflix pull back on the curtain on how they tackled it.

  Brett Axler, Casper Choffat, and Alo Lowry — Netflix

Java uses memory outside of the heap, so it can OOM in a container even if the heap size is well below the container’s memory limit.

   Ramya vani Rayala — DZone

It’s not about obviously wrong stuff — it’s the queries that look good on the surface that can bet you in trouble, per this article. They also share methods to vet LLM-generated SQL.

  Readyset

The mental model we use: AI handles the effort so humans can focus on the insight. Not AI instead of thinking.

  incident.io

[…] because AI tools continue to make it cheaper to write (and rewrite) code on demand, production environments will become the primary place to evaluate whether software is correct or incorrect.

  Peter Farago — RunLLM

The old way: heroes in incident response are an anti-pattern.
The new way: heroes are great and we should make as many heroes as we can.

  Hamed Silatani — Uptime Labs

I had to read this one twice before I had my galaxy-brain moment in the second-to-last paragraph.

  Lorin Hochstein