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 airing now. New episodes are added weekly on Wednesdays at 1p.m. UTC. Tune in to hear lively discussions about the role Software Engineering plays in Site Reliability Engineering.
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
Embracing Complexity with Christina Schulman & Dr. Laura Maguire
In this episode of the Prodcast, we are joined by guests Christina Schulman (Staff SRE, Google) and Dr. Laura Maguire PhD (Principal Engineer, Trace Cognitive Engineering). They emphasize the human element of SRE and the importance of fostering a culture of collaboration, learning, and resilience in managing complex systems. They touch upon topics such as the need for diverse perspectives and collaboration in incident response, the necessity of embracing complexity, and explore concepts such as aerodynamic stability, and more.
Maglev: load balancing at Google with Cody Smith and Trisha Weir
In this episode, Cody Smith (CTO and Co-founder, Camus Energy) & Trisha Weir (SRE Department Lead, Google) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg, to discuss their experience developing Maglev, a highly available and distributed network load balancer (NLB) that is an integral part of the cloud architecture that manages traffic that comes in to a datacenter. Starting with Maglev’s humble beginnings as a skunkworks effort, Cody and Trisha recount the challenges they faced, and emphasize the importance of psychological safety, collaboration, and adaptability in SRE innovation.
Profiling data with Pat Somaru and Narayan Desai
In this episode, guests Narayan Desai (Principal SRE, Google) and Pat Somaru (Senior Production Engineer, Meta) join hosts Steve McGhee and Florian Rathgeber to discuss the challenges of observability and working with profiling data. The discussion covers intriguing topics like noise reduction, workload modeling, and the need for better tools and techniques to handle high-cardinality data.
Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8) with Wilmer van der Gaast and Andy Sykes
This episode features Google engineers Wilmer van der Gaast (Production on-tall) and Andy Sykes (Senior Staff Systems Engineer, SRE), joining hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg, to discuss the development and maintenance of Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8). They highlight the initial motivations for creating the service, technical challenges like cache poisoning and load balancing, as well as the collaborative effort between SRE and SWE teams to address these issues. They also reflect on the evolving nature of SRE and advice for aspiring SREs.
SRE in the Retail and Gaming Worlds with Jordan Chernev & Scott Bowers
Guests Jordan Chernev (Senior Technology Executive) and Scott Bowers (SRE, Gearbox Software) who hail from the retail and gaming industries, respectively, join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to discuss the unique challenges of Site Reliability Engineering in their industries. They share the importance of aligning SLOs with user experience, strategies for handling spikes in traffic, communicating with users during outages, and investing in reliability.
Incident Response with Sarah Butt and Vrai Stacey
Sarah Butt (Principal Engineer, Centralized Incident Response, Salesforce) and Vrai Stacey (Staff Software Engineer, Google) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to dive into incident response—particularly tooling and software for reliability incidents. Tune in for an in-depth discussion on topics such as the importance of communication and collaboration during incidents, and the role of tooling in supporting incident response processes. Sarah and Vrai also share personal takeaways from incidents they have experienced.
Building Reliable Systems with Silvia Botros and Niall Murphy
Silvia Botros (SRE Architect, Twilio | Author of "High Performance MySQL, 4th edition") and Niall Murphy (Co-founder & CEO, Stanza) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg, to discuss cultural shifts in database engineering, rate limiting, load shedding, holistic approaches to reliability, proactive measures to build customer trust, and much more!
Creating Systems that are Safe with Liz Fong-Jones
Liz Fong-Jones (former Google SRE and current Field CTO at honeycomb.io) joins hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg for a lively discussion centered around observability, its evolution from monitoring, and its role in modern software development. Tune in for more on: the importance of observability as a spectrum, the evolving role of SREs, and advice to aspiring software engineers.
Production Problems Are For All! with Ben Treynor Sloss
Ben Treynor Sloss (VP of Engineering, Google) joins hosts Steve McGhee and Dr. Jennifer Petoff (Director of Technical Infrastructure Education, Google) to share the evolution of SRE and its impact on software development, how AI and ML significantly impacts SRE practices, and the future of SRE.
Ben coined the term "Site Reliability Engineering" for his team of (now) 4,000 software engineers, engaged in what were traditionally operations functions. Under Ben's leadership, Google SRE wrote two best-selling books on SRE. Since then, the rest of the SaaS industry has come to adopt the SRE name, mission, and practices.
There Remains a Huge Amount of Work to Do, with Healfdene Goguen
In this episode, Healfdene Goguen (Principal Engineer, Google) joins hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to discuss the vast amount of work to be done by SREs, and the fascinating challenges to tackle with clear real-world implications. It's a truly exciting time to be an SRE at Google!
SRE, a Basis of Influence with Amy Tobey & Vladyslav Ukis
In this season of Google Prodcast, current and former SREs, both within and outside of Google, chat with hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to discuss software systems designed and built by SREs.
For "episode zero", guests Amy Tobey and Vladyslav Ukis will set the stage for the season with a lively discussion about what Software Engineering means to Site Reliability Engineering.
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