What does Site Reliability Engineering look like when the "site" is an actual physical place? At a physical site, software is only one part of the system. Networks can disappear, machines have their own state, sensors provide incomplete evidence, and environmental conditions keep changing regardless of whether our infrastructure is healthy. A reliable cloud service does not necessarily mean a reliable site. Drawing from engineering systems that span cloud infrastructure, on-site computing, machines, sensors, and physical processes, this talk explores where the traditional reliability boundary starts to break down. It proposes a broader way to think about observability, failure, recovery, and system health when the physical site itself becomes part of the system we are responsible for keeping reliable.
An Phan is a Senior Data Infrastructure Engineer at Hippo Harvest, where he works on infrastructure spanning cloud systems and physical production sites. He has more than a decade of experience building software, data, and AI systems, with recent work focused on the challenges that emerge when computing meets the physical world. He regularly speaks about data infrastructure, Physical AI, and real-world production systems.
