Overview
SREcon is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale. It strives to challenge both those new to the profession as well as those who have been involved in it for decades. The conference has a culture of critical thought, deep technical insights, continuous improvement, and innovation. SREcon17 Americas welcomes participants from organizations exploring the adoption of devops and SRE principles as well as those with longer traditions and experience.

SREcon attendees want to discuss robust solutions to system engineering problems, particularly in high-stakes environments. The best talks share a team's take on new idea. We also welcome sessions about SRE philosophy.

Please join us in creating an excellent program for our fourth year of SREcon Americas, which will be the sixth SREcon event globally. Last year, we had over 400 attendees from over 100 companies, with backgrounds ranging from single-person startups, through tech giants with tens of thousands of employees, to finance and enterprise sector companies adopting SRE for the first time.

Our themes at last year’s conference included: clarifying definitions of who and what SREs are across the industry, scaling and load-balancing traffic, and conducting effective incident response. This year, our theme is looking forward to the next several years of SRE—where do we want to go from here, as a profession, as part of our organizations, and as individuals? We are especially interested in how to converge as an industry on common practices and principles, and how to anticipate, measure, and mitigate risk.

Proposals
We are looking for proposals in the following formats:

Talks:
20-minute talks with 5 minutes for Q&A, and
45-minute talks with 10 minutes for Q&A
Lightning talks:
5 minute or
10 minute talks
Panels: Moderator-led groups of 3–5 experts exploring different perspectives and responding to audience questions on a particular topic or theme
If you have a topic suggestion or request for a particular speaker you really would like to see at the conference, feel free to drop us a message at srecon17americas_chairs@usenix.org.

We will accept proposals through November 30, 2016, via the Web submission form, which will be available here soon. We’ll evaluate those and get back to you by December 18, 2016. Accepted speakers will be required to confirm their plan to present along with their talk information by January 2, 2017.

Lightning talk proposals will be accepted through February 4, 2017 with notification for accepted talks two weeks later.

Because panels can be challenging to do well, the program committee will provide some additional oversight for any accepted panel sessions.

Suggested Topics
* Successes and pitfalls on the road to SRE
* Automation, monitoring, and deployment
* Measuring and systematically fixing risk, including unknowns, technical debt, and burnout
* Disaster recovery from disasters big and small
* Cloud and SaaS migrations: when to outsource parts of your stack, and when/how to monitor and debug end to end
* Extending SRE culture to networking, security, privacy, and other facets of technology
* Culture/people
* How to cultivate, recruit, and retain SREs
* Catalyzing great SRE teams with a mixture of roles, including TPM, tech writer, UX design, and others
* Any other topic under the DevOps, SRE, and Production Engineering umbrellas