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Keep It Dull, Keep It Running: Runbooks and the Religion of Boring Platforms

Nobody dreams of a platform that is exciting at 2 a.m. In incident management, boring is beautiful. When the pager goes off, what matters most is not innovation, it is predictability, clarity, and trust in your systems and processes.

This session celebrates the discipline of building boring, reliable platforms and platformized incident response. Attendees will learn why bespoke runbooks, handcrafted alerts, and tribal knowledge do not scale, and how to retire them gracefully. The talk explores how to design for monotony and consistency to achieve faster, calmer, and more effective incident handling. You will also see how to turn your platform into an incident-aware system through automation patterns such as toggles, context injection, and stateful alerts, keeping humans in control while removing unnecessary toil. Because at 2 a.m., the best system is the one that behaves exactly as expected.

What You Will Learn

• How to build predictable, platform-native incident response workflows

• Why standardization and “boring” systems improve speed and resilience

• Practical patterns for automating toil while keeping human oversight

Who Should Attend

Site reliability engineers, platform engineers, and DevOps practitioners responsible for designing resilient systems and operational processes that scale calmly and consistently.