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SRE Q1 2026 Update

· 2 min read
John Lotoski
John Lotoski
Service Reliability Engineer

2026-01 - 2026-03​

Main achievements​

In addition to ongoing general maintenance and support of cardano environments, some highlights of SRE achievements for this quarter include:

  • All IOE cardano-parts supported node environments, including preview, preprod, and mainnet, were upgraded through cardano-node releases 10.5.4 and 10.6.2, with iterative pre-release candidate deployments of 10.7.0 tested throughout the quarter. New kes-agent and dmq-node binaries were integrated for node 10.7.0, and CI tests for consensus db-tooling were added to ensure bundled version compatibility.

  • An internal Dijkstra network was established for intra-era hard fork testing, respun with genesis parameter optimizations, and the van Rossem PV11 cost model was submitted, ratified, and enacted in preparation for Protocol Version 11. Demo and environment scripts were substantially improved with PV11 intra-era hard fork support, Constitutional Committee key voting, DRep registration, and constitution adoption.

  • The trace dispatcher was migrated out of cardano-node into its own repository, hermod-tracing. CI monitoring and alerting infrastructure was significantly expanded with Mimir Alertmanager, Loki ruler-based alerts, and Loki log shipping deployed to playground and mainnet environments.

  • The SRE team provided significant operational support for the launch of the USDCx service on Cardano, including infrastructure and monitoring contributions.

  • Darwin CI infrastructure received substantial upgrades including version bumps, guest VM lifecycle management, and improved alerting. Additional x86_64-linux build farm machines were added to the Hydra cluster to increase capacity.

  • Some cloud resources were relocated to more stable regions after disruption due to conflict in the Middle East.

Details for this and many other SRE work items can be found in the biweekly SRE reports.