SREs literally have the weight of Google services and infrastructure running on their shoulders. We are the people that keep all of the Google services up and running. That has always fascinated me, and is where I want to be: I want to be the person who gets to the root of issues. But also, I like the idea of knowing that I literally have the power of the internet in my hands.
Hear from SRE Experts
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Engineering reliability can go in a ton of different directions. And for me, that's part of why I find this discipline so fascinating. Engineering reliability is about questions. It's about asking your developers—and asking them to ask their customers—"What does reliability mean? What about your service matters if it's up and running? What would a user consider to be broken?". And then you focus on the work that impacts the aspects that actually matter.
Jennifer Mace
Learn more about SRE from this conversationSRE isn't necessarily about automating yourself out of a job. It's wondering what to automate so you can shift the complexity where you actually care to have it. For example, automating configuration deployment might allow you to offer more extensibility to users. Spend your complexity where your value is, not on the underlying supporting beams.Pierre Palatin
Learn more about SRE from this conversationEarly on in my SRE journey, my tech lead said something that has really stuck with me: he said that SREs are usually the people who run towards fires rather than away from them. In my experience, that has absolutely held true. It's one of the most rewarding aspects of the job—to be on the front lines of our services that billions of people use and rely upon.Megan Yin
Learn more about SRE from this conversationWe want to encourage a culture in which people are not afraid to take risks. If we want innovation, we need to take those risks. And if we want to take risks, we need to accept that failure will happen. And instead of focusing on the people, we need to focus on the system and processes that allowed it to happen.Ayelet Sachto
Learn more about SRE from this conversationSRE fuses the disciplines of software engineering and systems engineering with a deep understanding of how people and software interact at scale. By working across boundaries, Site Reliability Engineers drive transformational innovation in reliability and efficiency.Joan Smith
Fundamentally, it's what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations function.Ben Treynor Sloss
Learn more about SRE from this conversation