SREcon17 Europe/Middle East/Africa - Care and Feeding of SRE

Narayan Desai, Google

As SRE enters the ops zeitgeist, much of the focus has been placed on tactics—techniques that individual operations teams can adopt to improve their effectiveness. While there is value in singleton adoption, I'll make the case in this talk that organizational support and culture across the organization that corresponds with these tactics results in impact far greater than the sum of its parts. I'll focus on three SRE goals: maintaining SLOs, managing operational load, and maximizing leverage, and discuss failure modes without sufficient organizational support. These aren't tactics that can be fully implemented by an operations team. SRE is an organizational strategy that need to be adopted by the business.