SRE Prodcast
Prodcast is Google's podcast about Site Reliability Engineering and production software.
Season 1 discusses concepts from the SRE Book with experts at Google.
Season 2: Life of An SRE examines the career path and growth of individuals in SRE.
Season 3: Champions of the Internet is currently in production and will be available during the latter half of 2024!
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Season 1
Postmortems with Ayelet Sachto
Ayelet Sachto offers advice on creating an actionable, transparent, and blameless postmortem culture.
Incident Management with Adrienne Walcer
Adrienne Walcer discusses how to approach and organize incident management efforts throughout the production lifecycle.
On-Call Rotations with Andrew Widdowson (APW)
Andrew Widdowson (APW) shares strategies for successful on-call rotations.
Automation with Pierre Palatin
Pierre Palatin dives into different automation strategies, how to build confidence in your system, and why designing the UI may be your biggest challenge.
Client-Transparent Migrations with Pavan Adharapurapu
Pavan Adharapurapu details how to approach large-scale migrations while optimizing for user experience.
Rethinking SLOs with Narayan Desai
Narayan Desai explains why SLOs can be problematic and proposes alternative methods for monitoring complex, large-scale systems.
Alerting with Amelia Harrison
Amelia Harrison advises on when and how to alert, ideal coverage, and tuning.
Customer-Centric Monitoring with Silvia Esparrachiari
Silvia Esparrachiari talks about the challenges of monitoring and the importance of understanding your users.
SRE Philosophy with Jennifer Mace (Macey)
What is SRE, anyway? Jennifer Mace (Macey) gives us her definition of "site reliability engineer," discusses how to manage risk, and shares key questions to ask developers.
Creating the SRE Prodcast with John Reese (JTR)
Host MP English and former Google SRE John Reese (JTR) chat about the creation of the Prodcast.
Season 2
Life of An SRE: Beyond Google
Former Google SREs, or “Xooglers”, talk with hosts MP and Steve McGhee about site reliability engineering outside of Google. What’s the difference in scale? What skills are generally valuable? And why can’t you build “SRE in a box” that jump-starts pretty much any organization?
Life of An SRE with Sabrina Farmer
Sabrina Farmer, VP of Engineering at Google, talks about her career journey through Site Reliability Engineering. What does management mean? What’s involved in being an effective manager? and what’s a feasibility study? Hear some great advice on how to get what you expect out of a role, wherever on the ladder it is.
Life of An SRE with Dave Reisner
Dave Reisner talks about his path to Staff SRE, from ArchLinux contributor through DevOps to software engineer. This episode emphasizes the value of strong mentoring and manager relationships, and the challenges of work-life balance.
Life of An SRE with Stephen Benjamin
Explore the role and responsibilities of an SRE manager with Stephen Benjamin.
Life of An SRE with Jessica Theodat
Explore the role and responsibilities of a Senior SRE with Jessica Theodat, as she discusses life-work balance, the value of mentoring, and being a Black woman in SRE.
Life of An SRE with Shannon Brady and Theo Klein
Explore the career paths of SREs Shannon Brady and Theo Klein, as they discuss their paths to Site Reliability Engineering and finding their areas of expertise.
Life of An SRE with Mariuxi Vasconez and Julian Alarcon
In this episode, Mariuxi and Julian discuss their paths to SRE: what drew them initially to SRE, and what motivates them to continue developing skills
Life of An SRE with Tom Cranitch and Megan Yin
How does one become an SRE? And what’s the career like? In this episode, Tom and Megan discuss their path to SRE.
Season 3
Season 3 in production.
Meet your Hosts
MP English
Systems Engineer
Steve McGhee
Reliability Advocate, SRE
Jordan Greenberg
Program Manager, Google Cloud Platform
Foreword
The Google Prodcast Team has gone through quite a few iterations and hiatuses over the years, and many people have had a hand in its existence. For the longest time, a handful of SREs produced the Prodcast for the listening pleasure of the other engineers here at Google.
The credit for a lot of the project really goes to John Reese, known around Google as JTR. The Prodcast was a project he kept alive as other team members came and went. Eventually, JTR decided to explore the world outside of Google and the Prodcast was left in an uncertain state. I had been a part of the team for a while, Viv had just joined the team, and the other member of the team had to step away due to other commitments.
At this point, we decided to make a hard pivot. We decided that we wanted to make a podcast for more than just engineers at Google. We wanted to make something that would be of interest to folks across organizations and technical implementations. In his last act as part of the Prodcast, JTR put us in touch with Jennifer Petoff, Director of SRE Education, in order to have the support of the SRE organization behind us. With that, we turned to one of the most studied resources in SRE: the Google SRE Book.
We didn't want to rehash what the book already discussed in detail; we might as well have just recorded an audiobook if that was our goal. Originally, we were aiming for something in the neighborhood of an update—a revision—to the SRE Book. What we ended up with was a series of conversations with domain experts at Google that often challenged the orthodoxy of the SRE Book, sometimes entirely reframing the topic, as is particularly the case with our episode on SLOs, one of my personal favorites.
I found myself learning new things during every recording session, even though we had already met with our guests to map the episodes out! It was an absolute pleasure chatting with all our guests, to the point that we often continued talking after we finished recording. I am immensely grateful to all our guests for the time they contributed so that we may put all of this together for you. I hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed recording.
To the present and future reliability of you and your services,
— MP English from the Prodcast Team
Acknowledgments
Core team: Steve McGhee, Sunny Hsiao, Paul Guglielmino, Jordan Greenberg, Florian Rathgeber, Salim Virji
In addition to our Prodcast guests, we acknowledge the contributions of Javi Beltran, Betsy Beyer, MP English, Cara Pardo, Jennifer Petoff, John Reese, Viv, Pamela Vong, and Andrew Widdowsdon
