March — Magical Marilliers

Nearly a quarter of the world watches cricket. Cricketing stars are larger than life and are revered like demi-gods. And as sporting events go, the Indian Premier League is as big as they come. It’s the second-costliest sporting league in the world, next only to the NFL. Astoundingly, it generates more revenue than the English Premier League. (The EPL started in 1992, and the IPL started in 2008)

And that brings me to the Marillier shot.

The Marillier shot, or paddle scoop as it’s commonly known, is a shot that got popular since the advent of the IPL in 2008. It’s not one of those textbook shots, but uses the pace of the ball to deflect the shot behind the batsman. It’s named after the Zimbabwean batsman Dougie Marillier, and even though it’s not graceful (clearly, look at that picture! ??) it can be an incredibly potent shot; frustrating the bowler and fielders.

It’s one of my favourite cricketing shots, because it’s so unconventional. It’s so audacious and cheeky; gets the crowd going. But… can also be very embarrassing if you don’t pull it off right.

March was Marillier month for us at Last9. We had to think unconventionally, create interesting playbooks to manage what we like to call as ‘Cricket scale’.

What in the world is ‘Cricket scale’ you ask?

It’s a question we often get asked. Given our expertise working with massive scale, it takes a lot to understand the Rube Goldberg that’s microservices. And when you throw-in 30+ million concurrent users, things get haywire real quick. But enough with that, Aniket has you covered on what this all means in our universe - https://last9.io/blog/understanding-cricket-scale/

Interesting stories that caught our attention

• ???A single-line bug cost these folks $2000 in AWS spend - here
• ???How do you do logs in production? [Comments] - here
• ???Reddit was down, their RCA is a good read - here
• ??? <Insert any ChatGPT story here> There were so many, wow! Share us your favourite? ??

While there are reams written about ChatGPT/AI and everything that’s going to take our jobs, there’s little to understanding the space we operate in. You see, DevOps/SRE is one of those fields filled with jargon. Even we get confused about what people are talking about. So, in this adjective-searching industry, Mohan has an ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5) about the space we operate in.

Share widely with folks who want to know everything about ‘Reliability engineering’/DevOps/SRE - here

Prathamesh has saved us all some time by pouring through the Grafana Labs ‘Observability survey’ for the year with some interesting insights - here.

The one that really surprised us all - “11% of companies use 16 or more observability tools”. WTF!        

We were are SREcon, America! ??

Friend and peer, Sebastian Vietz wrote for us on interesting quotes he picked from the conference and the talks he liked. Check em out - here

Last, but not least, we have a Substack featuring ‘A day in the life of an SRE’. Lots of stories from folks and what they’re up to. Do check it out - here

You can also join our?Discord, where we hang out with like-minded SREs and DevOps folks to discuss all things Observability and Reliability. We call it the?Last9 of Reliability ??

P.S. Tell us which one was written by an AI ???? ??

See ya’ll in April! Wish us luck ??