Intro to SRE
Reliability is a critical feature of most software, and maintenance rather than initial development predominates the cost of most software systems.
Co-developer: Alesia Braga
About
I make developers, operators, and workers as a whole more productive and empowered.
Liz is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with over two decades of experience. She is currently a Technical Fellow at honeycomb.io, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights.
She lives in Vancouver, BC with her wife Elly and partners, and in Sydney, NSW. She plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights.
Speaking Topics
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Cultivating Production Excellence
Changing the way we approach tools, collaboration, and success metrics for managing distributed systems. Covers production stakes, observability for collaboration, Service Level Objectives, and risk-based prioritization.
QCon London 2019, Velocity San Jose (keynote), DevOpsDays Atlanta
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Tradeoffs on the Road to Observability
Examining how SREs spend their time and how we can empower non-SRE engineers instead of seeking individual recognition.
Monitorama PDX 2019
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Refining Systems Data Without Losing Fidelity
Statistics can come to our rescue, enabling us to gather accurate, specific, and error-bounded data through reducing junk data, reusing data points as samples, and recycling data into counters.
SREcon Europe 2019
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Organizing for Your Ethical Principles
How engineers can ensure their work serves the public good through grassroots employee advocacy.
SREcon EMEA 2018 (joint keynote with Emily Gorcenski), Write/Speak/Code 2018, QCon NYC 2018
Recent Talks
- SREcon 2025 - Fast, reproducible builds with Docker Bake
- YOW! Conference 2025 - Speaking at Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne
- PlatformCon 2025
- AWS re:Invent 2024 - DEV302: Optimizing performance and cost with AWS Graviton (video)
- GOTO Chicago 2024 - Using Serverless and ARM64 for Real-Time Observability
- SREcon Americas 2024 - Workshop: Cloud-Native Observability with OpenTelemetry
- AWS re:Invent 2023 - Seamless observability with AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry
- AWS Summit New York 2022 - Featured customer speaker in Dr. Werner Vogels' keynote, discussing Honeycomb's AWS Graviton migration story
Archived Talks
Debugging Microservices
When using tens or hundreds of microservices to provide an application's critical functionality, diagnosing interactions becomes complex.
Co-developers: George Talbot, Adam Mckaig
Venues & Videos:
Reliable Inclusion
Making your team safe and inclusive doesn't end with unconscious bias training.
Venues:
- Flawless Hacks 2018 - slides
- Velocity NY 2016
- Internal Google training
Effective Service Level Objectives
Service level objectives and error budgets are the cornerstone of Site Reliability Engineering.
Co-developers: CRE team (Kristina Bennett, Alex Bramley, David Ferguson, Marie Cosgrove-Davies)
Venues & Videos:
Relieving Tech Debt w/ Interrupt Reduction Projects
Planning approach addressing month-long projects, oncall rotations, and week-long technical debt initiatives.
Co-developers: John Tobin, Dave O'Connor
Venues:
Managing Up and Sideways
Guidance on handling management challenges and influencing projects as individual contributor or tech lead.
Venues & Videos:
- Lesbians Who Tech NYC 2018 keynote - video, slides, a11y notes
- SREcon 2016 Europe
Build skills through hobbies! Bring them to work!
Building technical and leadership skills doesn't only happen in the workplace!
Venues & Videos:
Professional Experience
Technical Fellow, honeycomb.io
December 2025 - Present
Technical advocacy and observability innovation.
Field CTO, honeycomb.io
October 2022 - December 2025
Customer-facing technical leadership and strategic guidance.
Principal Developer Advocate, honeycomb.io
February 2019 - October 2022
Developer advocacy, community building, and observability education.
2008 - 2019
Site Reliability Engineer and staff engineer positions focusing on SRE, distributed systems, and infrastructure. Products included Google Cloud Load Balancer, Google Flights, Bigtable, and GFE.
Education & Credentials
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 2014
Senior Member of the Australian Computer Society [MACS (Snr) CP]
Publications & Videos
Observability Engineering
O'Reilly, May 2022. Co-authored with Charity Majors and George Miranda.
Video Series
- What's the Difference Between DevOps and SRE? - Most well-known video with Seth Vargo explaining "class SRE implements DevOps"
Recent Blog Posts (2024-2025)
- "The Most Important Developer Productivity Metric" (Honeycomb, January 2025)
- "Debugging Kubernetes Autoscaling with Honeycomb Log Analytics" (Honeycomb, October 2024)
- "Why Every Engineering Team Should Embrace AWS Graviton4" (Honeycomb, July 2024)
- "Framework for an Observability Maturity Model" (Honeycomb, June 2024)
Selected Articles & Papers
- "SRE vs. DevOps: competing standards or close friends?" (GCP Blog) with Seth Vargo
- "How SRE relates to DevOps" in Site Reliability Workbook with Betsy Beyer and Niall Murphy
- "Sustainable Operations in Complex Systems With Production Excellence" (InfoQ)
- "Intersections between Operations and Social Activism" in Seeking SRE with Emily Gorcenski
- "Jeff Bezos is wrong, tech workers are not bullies" (Financial Times) with Laura Nolan et al.
- "Our Executives Engaged in Abuse. Don't Let Kink and Polyamory Be Their Scapegoats" (Medium)
- "Interrupt Reduction Projects" (USENIX ;login:) with John Tobin and Betsy Beyer
- "A Hierarchy of SRE Needs" (blog)
- "The Myth of Psychological Safety" (blog)
Interviews & Podcasts
- GCP Podcast Episode 127 - SRE vs. DevOps with Seth Vargo, Melanie Warrick, Mark Mandel
- GCP Podcast Episode 139 with Melanie Warrick and Mark Mandel
- Screaming in the Cloud Episode 19 with Corey Quinn
- Fireside Chat at FutureStack NYC with Matthew Flaming
- DevOps/SRE AMA with Charity Majors and Adam Jacob, hosted by Andrew Smirnov
- o11ycast Episode 6 with Charity Majors and Rachel Chalmers
- Frequent panel participation on management, SRE, and ethics
Technical Press & Citations
- "SRE model requires technical, organizational optimization skills" (TechTarget, Oct 2018) - On grumpy humans and system scale
- "Google Cloud Next '18" (Computer Weekly, July 2018) - Features SRE/DevOps video playlist with Seth Vargo
- "How Facebook operations got 10 times faster" (CNET, July 2018) - On sophisticated tracing tools
- "Debugging Microservices: Lessons from Google, Facebook, Lyft" (The New Stack, July 2018) - On dashboard cognitive overload
- "Defining the role of a Site Reliability Engineer" (ITOpsTimes, March 2018) - On SRE as a specialized job function
- "No Grumpy Humans and Other SRE Lessons from Google" (The New Stack, Oct 2017) - On communication, humility and trust in SRE
Community Involvement
USENIX SREcon
- Global Steering Committee Member (2017-present)
- Program Co-Chair: SREcon Asia/Australia 2022, SREcon Americas 2016, 2017, 2019
- Program Committee Member: SREcon Europe 2016, 2017; SREcon {Americas, EMEA, Asia/Australia} 2018
Other
- OpenTelemetry Governance Committee Emeritus
- AWS Community Hero (2022-present)
Grants & Investments
Non-Profit Grantees
- National Center for Transgender Equality (also board member 2018-2020)
- Coworker Solidarity Fund (founder, board chair)
- Lambda Legal
- Trans Lifeline
- Transgender Law Center
- Brooklyn Bail Fund
- Black and Brown Founders
- Native Women Lead
- Zebras Unite
- Paladin
- Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity
- Alliance for Safe Traffic Stops
- And others
For-Profit Seed Investments
- Backstage Studio
- Tall Poppy (board member)
- Career Karma
- MyWellbeing
- Posture Media
Ethel's ClubAppolitionAstral AR- And others
Connect