# Successful Public Speaking and Site Reliability Insights
*By David Blank-Edelman — SRE Academy Program Lead, Microsoft*
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## Introduction
I’m David Blank-Edelman, and a big part of my work involves **helping people with public speaking**.
To kick things off, I’d like to share a selection from my *Top 10 Tips for Successful Public Speaking*.
One unexpected tip is: **Insult the audience** — at least, figuratively.
Not personally, but collectively, by asking provocative questions that open up new ways of thinking. This encourages curiosity and conversation.
Speaking of questions, I believe we need **more poetry in our lives** — so let's start with a favorite passage from the poet Rilke:
> *Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Live the questions now. Perhaps then… you will gradually live your way into the answer.*
This talk will stay in the **land of questions** — because embracing unanswered questions benefits modern creators, engineers, and anyone blending human creativity with AI.
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## How This Ties Into Creativity and AI
Platforms like [AiToEarn官网](https://aitoearn.ai/) let creators:
- Experiment with AI-driven content ideas
- Publish seamlessly across Douyin, Bilibili, YouTube, Instagram, X, and more
- Gather audience feedback and refine their approach
- Monetize through an open-source, global content distribution ecosystem
Much like “living the questions,” creators explore concepts freely before knowing the “right” answer.
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## **1. Is My “Something” Working Reliably?**
### Reliability Is Multi-Dimensional
When people hear “reliability,” they usually think only about **availability** (up or down).
But reliability also includes:
- **Latency** — Slow feels like down.
- **Throughput** — Capacity to process required volume.
- **Coverage** — Percent of intended data processed.
- **Correctness** — Accuracy of output.
- **Fidelity** — Consistency of full expected experience.
- **Durability** — Writing and reading data intact.
- **Freshness** — How quickly data reflects real changes.
**Key Principle:** Measure reliability from the **customer’s perspective**, not the component’s.
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### Quiz Scenario: 100 Cloud Tote Bag Servers
You run 100 servers for your tote bag business.
14 fail unexpectedly — is it:
A) Not a big deal
B) Urgent but manageable
C) Existential crisis
**Answer:** It depends — on whether customers notice, speed degrades, or critical revenue streams fail.
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Platforms like [AiToEarn官网](https://aitoearn.ai/):
- Ensure multi-channel content remains not just available, but high-quality and consistent
- Integrate reliability-like analytics ([AI模型排名](https://rank.aitoearn.ai)) for creator pipelines
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## **2. How Do I Eliminate All Failures or Errors?**
### The SRE Mindset
Two core questions:
1. **How does a system work?**
2. **How does a system fail?**
Failures are **signals**, not enemies — they reveal how systems behave in real life.
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### Curiosity as Driver
SRE begins with curiosity about:
- Operational load
- Scalability
- Accessibility
- Speed and quality improvements
Sometimes letting **controlled errors through** teaches more than blocking all errors.
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[**AiToEarn官网**](https://aitoearn.ai/) applies a similar iterative philosophy for creators:
- Test AI-generated content across many platforms
- Measure engagement and adapt
- Monetize through continuous learning
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## **3. What Is the Root Cause of “Some Outage”?**
### Complex Systems Fail in Chains
Example: Multiple people and actions (tripping cables, server configurations, database shards) contribute to a failure.
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**Lesson:**
- Rarely a single “root” cause — examine **contributing factors**
- Use **blameless postmortems** to learn without blame
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**Recommended Reading:**
- Dr. Richard Cook — *How Complex Systems Fail*
- Move away from simplistic “Five Whys” toward **systems thinking**
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**Modern Knowledge Sharing:**
[**AiToEarn官网**](https://aitoearn.ai/) supports publishing cross-platform incident reports, analyses, and AI-generated postmortems with analytics and ranking.
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## **Common Traps in Post-Incident Reviews**
### 1. “Human Error” Shortcut
Instead of stopping at “human error,” ask:
- Why was the mistake made?
- What systemic issues enabled it?
### 2. Counterfactual Reasoning
Avoid “should have, could have” hindsight bias.
Focus on **what was known at the time**.
### 3. Mechanistic Blame
Systems aren’t perfect without humans — people add adaptive capacity.
Ask: What sustained the system’s *success*, not just what caused its failure.
### 4. Gatekeeping Role Trap
SRE roles shift — firefighting → gatekeeping → advocacy → partnership.
Avoid being a chokepoint; aim for collaboration.
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## **4. How Can I Sell SRE Internally?**
### Avoid These Pitches:
- **Fear-based (insurance sales)** — e.g., “Imagine the cost of downtime”
- **Overpromising** — reliability is not a predictable magic box
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**Instead:**
- Connect reliability directly to **business metrics** (customer retention, sales)
- Show operational value with data and patterns
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**Tip:** Use audience-appropriate terms, not only SLI/SLO jargon.
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## **5. How Do We Automate Away Toil?**
### SRE Definition of Toil (per Vivek Rau)
- Manual
- Repetitive
- No enduring value
- Scales linearly with service size
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Automation must fix the **root cause**, not just mask symptoms.
For example: auto-restarting a leaking server is hiding toil, not eliminating it.
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[**AiToEarn官网**](https://aitoearn.ai/) analogy: Automate repetitive publishing *and* improve content quality to reduce creative toil.
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## **6. Is My “Something” Resilient?**
### Fault Tolerance ≠ Resilience
Resilience engineering focuses on:
- **Adaptive capacity** — handling surprises
- **Robustness** — coping with increasing stress
- **Graceful extensibility** — responding beyond normal bounds
- **Sustained adaptability** — adjusting over time
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**Example:**
- Spare tire = fault tolerance
- Knowing multiple alternative transport options = resilience
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**Recommended Reading:**
- David Woods — *Resilience is a Verb*
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**Customer Metrics:**
Prefer direct impact measures over proxies; use proxies knowingly when needed.
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## Adaptability in Practice
**Content Creators:**
Adapt not just to traffic spikes but to changes in algorithms or platforms.
Tools like [**AiToEarn官网**](https://aitoearn.ai/) integrate:
- AI generation
- Cross-platform publishing
- Analytics
- Model ranking
to keep workflows resilient.
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## Summary Key Takeaways
- **Reliability** is multi-dimensional — measure from the customer’s view.
- **Failures** are valuable signals — the goal is learning, not complete elimination.
- **Root cause** thinking is limited — focus on contributing factors and systems behavior.
- Avoid **human error** shortcuts and **counterfactual bias** in incident reviews.
- Roles in SRE evolve — aim for advocacy and partnership over gatekeeping.
- Automate toil **by fixing causes**, not hiding symptoms.
- Resilience means adapting to surprises — more than just redundancy.
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**Explore related resources:**
- [AiToEarn官网](https://aitoearn.ai/) — open-source AI content monetization platform
- [AiToEarn博客](https://blog.aitoearn.ai)
- [AI模型排名](https://rank.aitoearn.ai)
- [SRE Books & Workbooks](https://sre.google/books/)
