SREcon23 Europe/Middle East/Africa Call for Participation

Overview

The past few months have brought changes for all of us. In times where we have to do more with less, how do we continue to prioritise, maintain relevance amidst changing demands, and deliver business value in our roles?

For SREcon23 EMEA, we would like to invite our community to look ahead, and participate by submitting talks with focus on emerging industry trends such as (and not limited to):

• Security and SRE
• Resource optimisation
• Sustainability
• Nurturing talent
• Hypergrowth/high demand
• SRE in non-tech industries
• Artificial Intelligence and SRE

Every talk submission is absolutely welcome, as well as areas we have not explored enough in past conferences. Additionally, beyond this year’s main focus, we are particularly interested to hear your stories about when things went well, and how a crisis was averted.

Please join us in creating an excellent program for SREcon23 EMEA!

SREcon participants come from a wide variety of backgrounds: small startups, tech giants with tens of thousands of employees, finance and enterprise sector companies adopting or expanding SRE in their organisations, and academia. New speakers are encouraged to submit talks; many of our best talks have come from people with new perspectives to share and the previous year most certainly has given us all new experiences and stories we can share and learn from.

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, customer experience/support, security teams, DBAs, network administrators, compliance experts, UX designers, health care professionals, scientists, and economists. 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 SREcon23 Europe/Middle East/Africa.

Talks

• Talks
• 15-minute talks followed by 5 minutes for Q&A
• 30-minute talks followed by 10 minutes for Q&A
• Lightning Talks
• We are accepting proposals for 4-minute Lightning Talks on any topic related to the practice of Site Reliability Engineering. Each selected talk should have exactly 16 slides, auto-advancing to the next slide every 15 seconds. The time limit is strict, so make sure that you have only one core idea for your talk. Talk submissions are due on 30 August, 2023. Slides for selected Lightning Talks are due on 26 September so that they can be run centrally. Please submit your proposals via the web submission system.
• Please note that lightning talk speakers do not receive special conference registration discounts and that only registered attendees may present lightning talks.

Suggested Topics

The increasing focus on security, as well as evolving threat landscape.

• What is the SRE perspective and role in a security incident?
• As the industry continues the drive towards cloud native development, with increased dependencies on third party libraries and software, how does this change our services’ risk and reliability posture?
• What are effective mechanisms and tools to manage supply chain security concerns?

Resource optimization given macro economic environment and operating constraints.

• Best practices for cloud workload optimization
• Public to private cloud migrations
• Hybrid clouds
• Maintenance of legacy systems
• Striking the right balance between “doing more (growth) with less (resources)”

Sustainability as a change driver and differentiator in operational resiliency and financial performance.

• How do we apply observability in the context of carbon efficiency and green software development?
• What is the environmental impact of our operations at scale?
• How do we make technical and operational choices which are more sustainable?

Finding and nurturing talent

• How do we continue to attract and coach new talent in our profession?
• How to make the leap from SRE to SRE manager, or vice versa?
• What does continuous learning mean in the context of the SRE profession?

Dealing with hypergrowth/high demand

• In a during/post pandemic world
• Releasing new features/products with unknown demand patterns

Non-technology focused industries where SRE is emerging

• Legacy systems/organisations with long history
• Retail, Transportation, Healthcare, etc.

SRE and Artificial Intelligence

• How to adopt AIOps
• Where is AIOps now?
• Future of AIOps

Systems Engineering/Principles Track

With the popularity of the Core Principles track at previous SREcon conferences, we are continuing this component at SREcon23. Systems Engineering track talks should focus on aspects of foundational technologies that are important to understand when supporting and scaling infrastructure.

For this track, we are looking for a number of topics, such as:

• Performance (e.g., CPU affinity, bottlenecks)
• Databases (e.g., how is data stored on disk in MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.?)
• Observability (e.g., monitoring overview, events vs. metrics, whitebox vs. blackbox, visualizations, debugging, etc.)
• Distributed Systems (e.g., consistency and consensus, Hadoop, MapReduce, Containers)
• Network (e.g., SD WAN, HTTP routing and load balancing, DNS)
• Firmware (e.g., Open Source Firmware, UEFI)
• Security (e.g., TPMs, Hardware Security Modules, transport encryption, filesystem encryption, data management)

Speaker Information

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

If you are a new presenter or would just like some extra help, please reach out. We can provide support via practice sessions, review of your pre-recorded videos, and a helpful guide on how to record your presentation to get the best results possible.

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.

SREcon23 Europe/Middle East/Africa is scheduled to be held in Dublin. All presentations will require in person participation. If public health restrictions intervene, we will adjust the requirements as the situation evolves.

If you have questions about this Call for Participation, feel free to drop us a message at srecon23emea_chairs@usenix.org.

Background (Overarching goals of the world-wide SREcon conferences)

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 endeavours 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.