# SRE — Sylvain Kalache

URL: https://www.sylvainkalache.com/topics/sre

My writing, talks, podcasts, and projects about SRE.

## Selected work

- [Eduardo Ordax — Principal GTM GenAI at AWS](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/eduardo-ordax-principal-gtm-genai-at-aws.md) (2025-12-14; Humans of Reliability): The reality of GenAI in production — why organizational culture is the biggest blocker, scaling non-deterministic LLM systems, and what separates AI winners from experimenters.
- [LLMs Broke the SRE Runbook. Now What?](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/llms-broke-the-sre-runbook-now-what.md) (2025-11-05; The New Stack): AI-generated code is outpacing traditional runbooks. How SRE teams are adapting their incident response playbooks for the LLM era.
- [From Vibes to Outages: Riding the AI Code Wave](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/from-vibes-to-outages-riding-the-ai-code-wave.md) (2025-10-08; SREcon EMEA 2025): AI-assisted coding is exploding — but acceleration doesn't mean reliability. Real examples of hard-to-trace LLM bugs, hallucinated dependencies, and operational fallout for lean SRE teams.
- [Will LLMs and Vibe Coding Fuel a Developer Renaissance?](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/will-llms-and-vibe-coding-fuel-a-developer-renaissance.md) (2025-07-09; The New Stack): Exploring whether AI-assisted coding tools will democratize software development or create new categories of hard-to-debug production issues.
- [Is AI-assisted coding an incident magnet?](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/is-ai-assisted-coding-an-incident-magnet.md) (2025-05-15; LeadDev): AI-generated code ships faster but introduces subtle bugs that are harder to trace. What engineering leaders need to know about the reliability trade-offs.
- [AI Made Developers 25% More Productive. It Also Tripled Our Incident Rate.](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/ai-productivity-and-incident-rates-devopsdays-denver-2026.md) (2026-09-22; DevOpsDays Denver): Speaking at the 10th annual DevOpsDays Rockies about how AI-assisted coding boosts developer productivity while increasing incident rates — and what reliability teams need to do about it.
- [Health Checks for Systems. What About Your Team?](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/health-checks-for-systems-what-about-your-team.md) (2026-09-10; Conf42): Applying system-level observability to team health: using signals from the stack to detect unsustainable on-call rotations and overwork before they lead to burnout and resignations.
- [10x more code 20x more incidents?](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/signals-conference-reliability-in-the-age-of-ai.md) (2026-09-10; Signals Conference): Speaking at Signals Conference, a curated single-track conference bringing together experts from SRE, MLOps, AIOps, and Data communities to discuss reliability challenges in the AI era.
- [AI Fails Like We Do](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/ai-fails-like-we-do.md) (2026-07-25; Engineering Futures): Sylvain Kalache went looking for the new ways AI breaks software. Every one turned out to be a habit we've had for years.
- [More Code, More Incidents? Staying Reliable When AI Writes the Code](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/more-code-more-incidents-staying-reliable-when-ai-writes-the-code.md) (2026-07-08; Incident Fest): Speaking on the Incident Fest Main Stage about staying reliable as AI-assisted development increases the rate at which software is created.
- [Eran Kampf — VP of Engineering at Twingate](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/eran-kampf-vp-of-engineering-at-twingate.md) (2026-07-06; Humans of Reliability): Why Twingate stopped shipping features to rebuild reliability — from active-active multi-region architecture and smaller blast radiuses to preserving human ownership as agentic coding accelerates delivery.
- [AIOps Summit](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/aiops-summit.md) (2026-06-23; AIOps Summit): Meta-hosted summit in Menlo Park focused on applying AI, LLMs, and agents to software incidents and response.
- [Alexey Grigorev — Founder of DataTalks.Club](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/alexey-grigorev-founder-of-datatalks-club.md) (2026-06-16; Humans of Reliability): How a chain of reasonable-sounding decisions led an AI coding agent to run terraform destroy against a live production database — and the guardrails that separate moving fast from losing everything.
- [AI Made Developers 25% More Productive. It Also Tripled Our Incident Rate.](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/ai-made-developers-25-more-productive-it-also-tripled-our-incident-rate.md) (2026-06-09; AI DevSummit): At AI DevSummit New York: how AI-assisted coding is reshaping software delivery — the productivity gains, the surge in incident rates, and what reliability teams need to do about it.
- [Hamed Silatani — Co-Founder and CEO at Uptime Labs](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/hamed-silatani-co-founder-and-ceo-at-uptime-labs.md) (2026-05-28; Humans of Reliability): Every pilot trains for engine failure, but most engineers face their first major incident unprepared — why communication, coordination, and decision-making need deliberate simulation practice.
- [The Science of On-Call Burnout: Why "How Are You Doing?" Always Gets "Fine"](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/the-science-of-on-call-burnout-why-how-are-you-doing-always-gets-fine.md) (2026-05-06; DevOpsDays Austin): Why traditional burnout detection fails in engineering teams. Connecting Maslach's burnout research and the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory to observable on-call metrics, and demonstrating that observed data outperforms subjective self-reporting.
- [Gandhi Kumar — Principal Incident Commander at Twilio](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/gandhi-kumar-principal-incident-commander-at-twilio.md) (2026-04-28; Humans of Reliability): The golden hour — why the first 15 minutes of an incident decide everything, from mitigation strategy to customer trust, and why human psychology matters more than tools.
- [Cliff Snyder — Senior SRE at Multimedia LLC](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/cliff-snyder-senior-sre-at-multimedia-llc.md) (2026-04-22; Humans of Reliability): From 600 to 6,000 — an 18-month transformation replacing legacy tooling with a purpose-built incident management platform, scaling operational responsibility from 600 SREs to 6,000 engineers across the org.
- [Ganesh Datta — Co-Founder & CTO at Cortex](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/ganesh-datta-co-founder-cto-at-cortex.md) (2026-04-09; Humans of Reliability): AI didn't change the game, it just exposed your bottlenecks — how platform engineering and SRE teams solve identical human problems through influence rather than authority, and why AI amplifies existing bottlenecks instead of transforming operations.
- [Reliability Rebels Podcast — Guest Appearance](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/reliability-rebels-podcast-guest-appearance.md) (2026-04-08; Reliability Rebels): Reliability Rebels Guest appearance to discuss reliability engineering, AI, and modern incident response.
- [Dana Lawson — CTO at Netlify](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/dana-lawson-cto-at-netlify.md) (2026-03-31; Humans of Reliability): Fear, identity, and flaky tests — why SRE resistance to AI agents stems from identity and control concerns rather than the technology itself, and practical strategies for adopting AI-driven reliability tools starting with low-risk tasks.
- [The Software Leaders Uncensored Podcast](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/the-software-leaders-uncensored-podcast.md) (2026-03-30; Software Leaders Uncensored): A candid conversation on software leadership, reliability engineering, and the evolving role of AI in modern engineering teams.
- [How AI is Changing Incident Response (SRE Deep Dive)](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/how-ai-is-changing-incident-response-sre-deep-dive.md) (2026-03-28; The Rollback Café): From faster detection to smarter debugging — where AI delivers practical value in incident response, its limitations in production environments, and how teams can integrate AI while maintaining reliability standards.
- [From Vibes to Outages: When AI Writes the Code You Debug](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/from-vibes-to-outages-when-ai-writes-the-code-you-debug.md) (2026-03-19; Conf42): LLM-assisted development introduces hard-to-trace bugs, AI-generated tests that mirror flawed logic, and hallucinated dependencies. Exploring operational consequences and actionable strategies from AI-powered incident tools to incident vibing.
- [Will Wilson — CEO at Antithesis](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/will-wilson-ceo-at-antithesis.md) (2026-03-19; Humans of Reliability): The incident you never had — deterministic simulation testing, why conventional testing misses bugs that cause real outages, and how simulation-based approaches improve software reliability.
- [Google SRE NYC Tech Talk — On-Call Health](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/google-sre-nyc-tech-talk-on-call-health.md) (2026-03-10; Google SRE NYC): The science behind responder overload and introducing On-Call Health, an open-source tool for detecting incident responder fatigue. At Google NYC Pier 57.
- [Stephen Townshend — SRE Team Lead at isDown](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/stephen-townshend-sre-team-lead-at-isdown.md) (2026-03-04; Humans of Reliability): Burnout doesn't ask permission — the physiology of burnout from an incident responder's perspective, warning signs, recovery, and the systemic changes the industry must make.
- [Swizec Teller — Bestselling Author](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/swizec-teller-bestselling-author.md) (2026-02-17; Humans of Reliability): Code is cheap, reliability isn't — owning production in the AI era, the hidden complexity of SRE work, and why human ownership remains essential.
- [Dileshni Jayasinghe — VP of Technology at commonsku](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/dileshni-jayasinghe-vp-of-technology-at-commonsku.md) (2026-01-14; Humans of Reliability): Democratizing reliability — empowering non-engineers with operational power, incident management as a muscle, and AI-powered postmortems.
- [Tomás Hernando Koffman — Co-founder at Not Diamond](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/tom-s-hernando-koffman-co-founder-at-not-diamond.md) (2025-12-23; Humans of Reliability): 99%+ accuracy on a moving target — model deprecation, reliability with LLMs, and treating prompts as architectural components.
- [Julien Simon — VP and Chief Evangelist](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/julien-simon-vp-and-chief-evangelist.md) (2025-11-19; Humans of Reliability): A conversation about developer advocacy, AI evangelism, and building reliable systems at scale.
- [Conor Bronsdon — Head of Content at Galileo](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/conor-bronsdon-head-of-content-at-galileo.md) (2025-11-05; Humans of Reliability): Developer awareness, content strategy, and the human side of reliability engineering.
- [Tea, Pipelines, and Retries: A Practical Guide to MLOps](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/tea-pipelines-and-retries-a-practical-guide-to-mlops.md) (2025-10-07; SREcon EMEA 2025): Discussion at SREcon EMEA 2025 on how AI is transforming the software development lifecycle — CI/CD pipelines, deployments, scaling, monitoring, incident management, reliability tooling, and emerging disciplines like LLMOps.
- [AI Meets Reliability](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/ai-meets-reliability.md) (2025-09-23; Rootly AI Labs): Panel exploring AI-driven automation and observability with leaders from NVIDIA, OpenAI, Baseten, Replit, and Weights & Biases on scaling operations and reducing MTTR.
- [Rob Zuber — CTO at CircleCI](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/rob-zuber-cto-at-circleci.md) (2025-09-10; Humans of Reliability): The end of good code, AI throughput, and what reliability means at CI/CD scale.
- [MCPs and the Next Wave of Reliability w/ Rootly AI, WorkOS, Block, Microsoft & Groq](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/mcps-and-the-next-wave-of-reliability-w-rootly-ai-workos-block-microsoft-groq.md) (2025-08-28; Rootly AI Labs): Panel at the AWS GenAI Loft in San Francisco on MCPs, incident automation, observability, and generative AI tooling for reliability.
- [Shery Brauner — SVP of Razor Group](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/shery-brauner-svp-of-razor-group.md) (2025-08-20; Humans of Reliability): Leading engineering at scale in e-commerce aggregation and the operational challenges that come with it.
- [Frontiers of AI: Building with Rootly AI, Zscaler, CircleCI, Fireworks AI & Google DeepMind](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/frontiers-of-ai-building-with-rootly-ai-zscaler-circleci-fireworks-ai-google-deepmind.md) (2025-07-25; Rootly AI Labs): Panel at Google HQ with 300+ attendees exploring real-world Gemini models, reinforcement learning, next-gen agent systems, and AI reliability.
- [Brian Shaw — SVP of Infrastructure and Core Banking](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/brian-shaw-svp-of-infrastructure-and-core-banking.md) (2025-07-03; Humans of Reliability): Building and operating core banking infrastructure with a focus on uptime and regulatory compliance.
- [Exploring AI's Role in Incident Management](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/exploring-ai-s-role-in-incident-management.md) (2025-06-30; Techstrong TV): Interview with Alan Shimel at PlatformCon NYC 2025 on how AI applies to incident management and reliability engineering — triage, root cause analysis, and why AI enhances rather than replaces engineers.
- [Rootly Roundtable: From Weak Signals to Confident Fixes](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/rootly-roundtable-from-weak-signals-to-confident-fixes.md) (2025-06-18; Rootly): Invite-only roundtable on filtering alert noise, enriching alerts with automated ownership context, and streamlining bug validation workflows.
- [David Owczarek — Former Engineering Director](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/david-owczarek-former-engineering-director.md) (2025-06-17; Humans of Reliability): Lessons from leading engineering teams through organizational change and system migrations.
- [Ryan Lockard — VP of Platform Engineering at CVS Health](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/ryan-lockard-vp-of-platform-engineering-at-cvs-health.md) (2025-05-30; Humans of Reliability): Platform engineering at healthcare scale — compliance, reliability, and developer experience.
- [Cosmo Wolfe — Head of Technology at Metronome](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/cosmo-wolfe-head-of-technology-at-metronome.md) (2025-05-26; Humans of Reliability): Building reliable billing infrastructure and the unique challenges of usage-based pricing systems.
- [Chase Roberts — COO at Northflank](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/chase-roberts-coo-at-northflank.md) (2025-05-14; Humans of Reliability): Operating a developer platform company and the reliability challenges of running infrastructure for others.
- [Rootly Roundtable: Centralized vs. Distributed Incident Teams](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/rootly-roundtable-centralized-vs-distributed-incident-teams.md) (2025-05-07; Rootly): Invite-only roundtable comparing centralized specialist responders with distributed on-call models — which strategy works for your org.
- [Justin Reock — Deputy CTO at DX](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/justin-reock-deputy-cto-at-dx.md) (2025-04-30; Humans of Reliability): Developer experience, engineering metrics, and what makes teams productive and reliable.
- [The Future of AI-Driven Reliability](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/the-future-of-ai-driven-reliability.md) (2025-04-24; Rootly AI Labs): Panel with leaders from a16z, Y Combinator, and Google Cloud on how MCP servers and agent-to-agent communication are revolutionizing developer tools. Demos from Anthropic, Sentry, Postman, and Browserbase.
- [Incident Vibing: The Self-Healing System](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/incident-vibing-the-self-healing-system.md) (2025-04-23; Adventures in DevOps): Tracing the arc from ingesting logs at LinkedIn/SlideShare to LLM-driven RCA today. How fine-tuning, MCP, and incident vibing are reshaping SRE.
- [Marino Wijay — Staff Solutions Architect at Kong](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/marino-wijay-staff-solutions-architect-at-kong.md) (2025-04-17; Humans of Reliability): API gateway architecture, service mesh patterns, and reliability at the network edge.
- [Mark Quigley — Head of Platform Engineering](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/mark-quigley-head-of-platform-engineering.md) (2025-04-09; Humans of Reliability): Building internal developer platforms and the organizational dynamics of platform teams.
- [Navigating DORA: A Guide to the EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/navigating-dora-a-guide-to-the-eu-s-digital-operational-resilience-act.md) (2025-04-08; Data Defenders Forum): Breaking down the EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act — what it means for financial services and tech companies operating in Europe.
- [Vibe Coding Is Here — But Are You Ready for Incident Vibing?](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/vibe-coding-is-here-but-are-you-ready-for-incident-vibing.md) (2025-03-19; The New Stack): If developers are vibe coding, SREs are now incident vibing. What happens when AI-generated code meets production reality.
- [Dan Slimmon — Incident Response Trainer](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/dan-slimmon-incident-response-trainer.md) (2025-03-13; Humans of Reliability): Training teams for incident response — chaos engineering, game days, and building organizational muscle memory.
- [Rootly Roundtable: The State of AI in Incident Management](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/rootly-roundtable-the-state-of-ai-in-incident-management.md) (2025-03-06; Rootly): Invite-only roundtable examining AI's role in incident response — separating practical applications from hype with industry leaders.
- [Mariano Cocirio — Staff Software Engineer at Vercel](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/mariano-cocirio-staff-software-engineer-at-vercel.md) (2025-03-06; Humans of Reliability): Frontend infrastructure reliability, edge computing, and the operational side of Vercel's platform.
- [Adriana Villela — Principal DevRel at Dynatrace](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/adriana-villela-principal-devrel-at-dynatrace.md) (2025-02-27; Humans of Reliability): Observability culture, OpenTelemetry adoption, and the human side of monitoring and debugging.
- [Sean Goedecke — Staff Software Engineer at GitHub](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/sean-goedecke-staff-software-engineer-at-github.md) (2025-02-18; Humans of Reliability): Reliability at GitHub scale — incident management, deployment practices, and engineering culture.
- [SRE-skills-bench](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/sre-skills-bench.md) (2025-02-01; GitHub): A benchmark suite for evaluating AI agents on real-world SRE tasks — incident diagnosis, runbook execution, and infrastructure troubleshooting.
- [On-Call-Health](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/on-call-health.md) (2024-06-01; GitHub): Detects early warning signs of on-call engineer burnout by pulling data from Rootly, PagerDuty, Linear, GitHub, and Slack.
- [AI-Driven Incident Resolution — Hype or Reality](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/ai-driven-incident-resolution-hype-or-reality.md) (2024-05-01; DevOpsDays Austin): A grounded look at what LLMs can and can't do in an incident response workflow today, drawn from real production experiments at Rootly AI Labs.
- [Automated Management of a Distributed Computing System](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/automated-management-of-a-distributed-computing-system.md) (2017-06-06; US Patent Office): US Patent (US9674031B2) — A machine learning-powered self-healing infrastructure that monitors distributed systems, detects anomalies, and automatically applies remedies based on historical incident data. Co-designed at LinkedIn.
- [First 5 Commands When I Connect on a Linux Server](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/first-5-commands-when-i-connect-on-a-linux-server.md) (2016-09-26; Linux.com): The essential first five commands every sysadmin runs when SSH-ing into a Linux server — from uptime to disk usage.
- [How DevOps Failed 60K Users](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/how-devops-failed-60k-users.md) (2016-06-23; Linux.com): A postmortem on a DevOps failure that affected 60,000 users — lessons in monitoring gaps, deployment practices, and incident response.
- [DevOps Students Learn the Value of Uptime With 3 a.m. Calls](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/devops-students-learn-the-value-of-uptime-with-3-a-m-calls.md) (2016-06-16; Linux.com): Teaching DevOps through real-world on-call rotations — how students learn the value of monitoring, alerting, and system reliability the hard way.

[All work](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/index.md)