Laura Nolan, Principal Software Engineer at Stanza, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to offer insights on how to use SRE to avoid disastrous and lengthy production delays. Laura gives a rich history of her work with SREcon, why her approach to SRE is about first identifying the biggest fire instead of toiling with day-to-day issues, and why the lack of transparency in systems today actually hurts new engineers entering the space. Plus, Laura explains to Corey why she dedicates time to work against companies like Google who are building systems to help the government (inefficiently) select targets during wars and conflicts.About LauraLaura Nolan is a software engineer and SRE. She has contributed to several books on SRE, such as the Site Reliability Engineering book, Seeking SRE, and 97 Things Every SRE Should Know. Laura is a Principal Engineer at Stanza, where she is building software to help humans understand and control their production systems. Laura also serves as a member of the USENIX Association board of directors. In her copious spare time after that, she volunteers for the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, and is half-way through the MSc in Human Factors and Systems Safety at Lund University. She lives in rural Ireland in a small village full of medieval ruins.Links Referenced:
Company Website: https://www.stanza.systems/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lauralifts

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-nolan-bb7429/

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. My guest today is someone that I have been low-key annoying to come onto this show for years, and finally, I have managed to wear her down. Lauren Nolan is a Principal Software Engineer over at Stanza. At least that’s what you’re up to today, last I’ve heard. Is that right?Laura: That is correct. I’m working at Stanza, and I don’t want to go on and on about my startup, but I’m working with Niall Murphy and Joseph Bironas and Matthew Girard and a bunch of other people who more recently joined us. We are trying to build a load management SaaS service. So, we’re interested in service observability out of the box, knowing if your critical user journeys are good or bad out of the box, being able to prioritize your incoming requests by what’s most critical in terms of visibility to your customers. So, an emerging space. Not in the Gartner Group Magic Circle yet, but I’m sure at some point [laugh].Corey: It is surreal to me to hear you talk about your day job because for, it feels like, the better part of a decade now, “Laura, Laura… oh, you mean USENIX Laura?” Because you are on the USENIX board of directors, and in my mind, that is what is always short-handed to what you do. It’s, “Oh, right. I guess that isn’t your actual full-time job.” It’s weird. It’s almost like seeing your teacher outside of the elementary school. You just figure that they fold themselves up in the closet there when you’re not paying attention. I don’t know what you do when SREcon is not in process. I assume you just sit there and wait for the next one, right?Laura: Well, no. We’ve run four of them in the last year, so there hasn’t been very much waiting. I’m afraid. Everything got a little bit smooshed up together during the pandemic, so we’ve had a lot of events coming quite close together. But no, I do have a full-time day job. But the work I do with USENIX is just as a volunteer. So, I’m on the board of directors, as you say, and I’m on the steering committee for all of the global SREcon events, and typically is often served by the program committee as well. And I’m sort of there, annoyi