SREcon Americas 2025

I had a great time attending - and speaking - last week at SREcon25 Americas!

2025-04-22 Update: a video of my talk is now available on my presentation page.

This was my second time at SREcon (in person), and once again I enjoyed both the talks as well as the conversations I had with other attendees. I also got to meet and reconnect with fellow members in the newly formed Resilience in Software Foundation.

My own talk, ‘Is the S in SRE for “Security”?’, went well, and I got positive feedback from people in attendance, including one person who went to my session by accident! The one thing I’d do differently next time would be to have a stronger call to action - if you are part of either a Cybersecurity or SRE team, my challenge to you is this: get to know your counterparts, learn about their work, and bring your unique skills to help them with their mission. I truly believe organizations will be better off if SRE and Security teams have a combined approach to inventory, configuration, patch management, observability, incident response, and testing.

Thanks also to the Minneapolis CNCF Community, who invited me to present a preview of my talk. Your feedback and questions helped make SREcon a success!

Abstract

There is significant overlap between Cybersecurity and SRE; understanding and leveraging that can improve the performance of both. Lessons from safety science tell us that security and SRE come through being successful more often, not failing less. Research in DevOps, Software Security, and elsewhere shows a strong link between different types of organizational performance, including development, operations, SRE, and security; in many cases, organizations most effectively reduce cybersecurity risk by improving general technology performance.

Many SRE capabilities overlap with Security, including the critical activities of patching & managing attack surface, along with observability, incident response, postmortems, testing, and platform engineering. SRE and Security teams can collaborate by supporting their mutual goals, sharing their perspectives dealing with incidents both frequent and rare, and by setting Security Level Objectives to inform decisions on when to divert resources to security as SRE teams do with Service Level Objectives.

Slides

My slides with notes, including references, are here.

Video

All USENIX conferences are Open Access! Slides and recordings are available for all past SREcon events, and a video of my talk is available on my presentation page!

Link

Here is the link from the QR code at the end of my talk: https://bento.me/jbenninghoff.