I’m back! Thank you all so much for the outpouring of support while SRE Weekly was on hiatus. My recovery is going nicely and I’m starting to catch up on my long backlog of articles to review. I’m going to skip trying to list all the outages that occurred since the last issue and instead just focus on a couple of interesting follow-up posts.

Articles

The Negotiability of “Severity” Levels So many awesome concepts packed into this article. Here are just a couple: Seen in this light, “severity” could be seen as a currency that product owners and/or hiring managers could use to ‘pay’ for attention. This yields the logic that if a customer was affected, learning about the incident is worth the effort, and if no customers experienced negative consequences for the incident, then there must not be much to learn from it. John Allspaw — Adaptive Capacity Labs

How Webhook.site handles 100 mbit/s traffic on a single VPS This shares more in common with the server behind sreweekly.com than I perhaps ought to admit to: Additionally, lots can be done for scalability regarding infrastructure: I’ve kept everything on a single, smaller server basically as a matter of stubbornness and wanting to see how far I can push a single VPS. Simon Fredsted

PostgreSQL: pg_upgrade can result in early wraparound on databases with high

transaction load A Reddit engineer explains a hidden gotcha of pg_upgrade that caused an outage I reported here previously. Jason Harvey — Reddit

Pilots at MIA’s Biggest Cargo Airline Warned Execs a Crash Was Coming. Then a Plane Went Down. This has “normalization of deviance” all over it. Taylor Dolven — The Miami Herald

Boeing Built Deadly Assumptions Into 737 Max, Blind to a Late Design Change The deep details around MCAS are starting to come out. This article tells a tale that is all too familiar to me about organizational pressures and compartmentalization. Jack Nicas, David Gelles and James Glanz — New York Times

Outages