How SREcon Asia Selected Its Top 35 Talks: Inside the Rigorous Review Process

Since the publication of Google's SRE book, SRE has become a staple for developers and operations engineers, with many companies hiring SRE engineers as a concrete example of DevOps culture.

SREcon, a world‑class conference for SRE engineers organized by USENIX, started in Silicon Valley in 2014 and has grown to its fourth edition. The first Asia/Australia edition was held in Singapore, co‑chaired by senior engineers from Baidu and Dropbox, with the author serving as a topic reviewer.

Timeline of Topic Collection

Early February – topic solicitation begins.

March 6 – deadline for standard (45 min) talks; March 20 – deadline for lightning (20 min) talks.

March 27 – speakers of standard talks notified; April 3 – speakers of lightning talks notified.

During the roughly 20‑day collection period, reviewers evaluate each submission to decide whether it can be included in the conference.

The review interface shows columns such as Topic Title, Type (e.g., CULTIVATE, AUTOMATION, DISASTER RECOVERY, etc.), Size (standard or lightning), and Submission Time. Reviewers assign a score of 0 – 3 (Not Acceptable, Satisfactory, Strongly Agree, Excellent) without seeing the submitter’s identity, ensuring unbiased assessment.

Out of 108 submitted topics, only 35 were accepted, reflecting a strict and fair selection process.

Agenda Overview

The three‑day program featured talks from companies like Baidu, Google, Dropbox, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others, with a focus on automation and monitoring. Chinese speakers contributed ten topics, and the speaker lineup included several pairs and a few female presenters.

Full program: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon17asia/program Stay tuned for the exciting content of the conference.