Explore a comprehensive conference talk on cultivating production excellence in complex distributed systems. Learn about essential practices for improving production environments, including fostering stakeholder involvement, enhancing observability through collaboration, implementing Service Level Objectives for measurement, and utilizing risk analysis for prioritizing improvements. Discover strategies to evolve your approach to managing increasingly complex systems, address common challenges like noisy alerts and meaningless dashboards, and shift focus towards investing in people, culture, and processes. Gain insights on setting effective Service Level Indicators, debugging novel cases in production, promoting collaborative debugging, addressing hero culture, and quantifying risks for better planning. Understand how these practices can lead to more humane and efficient system management, even allowing for confident Friday deployments.