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SPEAKER: So Dave, we meet again. it was just-- what--
nine months ago that you and I were hanging out here
at The 5th Nine at Next.
We were talking about your new book, I think.
So what have you been up to since we last spoke?
DAVE RENSIN: You know, it's cloud.
It's only one of Google's fastest growing businesses.
So not much.
Really video games, rock climbing.
A lot of [INAUDIBLE].
SPEAKER: That sounds about right.
DAVE RENSIN: Pretty sedate.
SPEAKER: Anything work related?
DAVE RENSIN: Oh, nah.
Yeah, I mean, lots of stuff.
Mostly working with customers and doing everything
we can to teach the world what it means to be an SRE
and how to do it well.
SPEAKER: So when attendees come to Next,
what can they expect when they visit us here
in The 5th Nine lounge?
DAVE RENSIN: Well, really, what we're
hoping for is to have those deep conversations about how it is
they go on their SRE journey.
We're still kind of at this stage
where we have to really prove to people that no, this
is not just something that only works at Google.
It can work anywhere.
SPEAKER: OK, let's get down to business
and get to the nitty gritty of SRE.
How do we help customers move towards implementing
SRE practices?
DAVE RENSIN: Well, so there are two things you really
have to do.
One, you have to make it easy for them to learn, right?
So we wrote these two best selling books.
So we have a Coursera course, where
we do a lot of writing and public speaking.
And then you have to make it easy
for them to practice it in the tools, right?
So there was a wonderful announcement today
from the Stackdriver team about SLO alerting and error budget
monitoring.
So those are really the two ways you
have to attack that problem.
SPEAKER: Fantastic.
So what is Google doing to help our customers meet
their own SLOs?
DAVE RENSIN: I think the best thing a customer can
do to reliably meet SLOs, besides building good products,
is actually share their monitoring with Google.
If you're using Stackdriver, and you set up an SLO dashboard,
you can actually share that with us
so that when you have difficult moments, and you will,
it becomes faster for everyone to debunk.
SPEAKER: Nice.
And so what is Google doing with that product
to help customers implement those SLOs and error
budgets themselves?
DAVE RENSIN: My personal goal at Google
is to make sure that it's easy in every product
to practice SRE principles, that rollouts and rollbacks are
unimportant and easy when you're doing them on--
I don't know-- GCE or GKE.
You saw the announcement this morning
of our new Kubernetes hybrid and on-prem solution.
We're going to make some other announcements about SLO
monitoring, and burn monitoring, and those solutions, too.
So we're really building at every layer of the stack.
SPEAKER: Fantastic.
Now I have been hanging out with a few SREs.
You hear a lot about accepting failure as normal.
How do you recommend customers go
about moving from every area is a problem to the mindset
of failure is normal?
DAVE RENSIN: A big problem is that for so long,
we've all been living under the tyranny of perfection.
We expect perfection.
And I would say to customers, tell me
one system designed by humans.
Software, hardware, economic, political, anything you want,
that's ever been 100% reliable.
And they can't.
And you know why they can't?
Because nature has never built one either.
So once you accept that it's not possible to do,
then the question becomes, well, how much failure is acceptable?
Because you're going to have some.
And that's where then we get into the conversations
about error budgets and SLOs.
SPEAKER: Yeah, that's a good segue.
So how do you see customers becoming
effective at managing the workloads of various SRE teams?
DAVE RENSIN: OK, so there are some good rule of thumb limits
about the number of incidents you can really
have during an on call period or how much of your project time
you can have.
So I think a good rule of thumb for people
is if you see your teams are spending at all anything
less than 50% of their calendar time,
their clock time on engineering projects,
they're headed for toil.
And they're not managing their load well.
But if you come talk to us, we can help
you inch your way through that.
SPEAKER: Absolutely, and so speaking
of that, what are your recommendation to customers
on how to take that first step of their journey towards SRE?
DAVE RENSIN: Well, there are a bunch of things you can do.
We've got two best selling books.
If you go to google.com/sre, you can read both of the books
for free.
We have a course in Coursera specifically
on SLOs that's really very popular.
If you're here at the show, come by The 5th Nine
and talk to SREs, talk to me or anyone else.
If you're a Google Cloud customer,
you can talk for free with the CRE team, the Customer
Reliability Engineering team.
We are a group of long tenured SREs,
and our job is to teach you how to adopt SRE and make
that easy and comfortable for you.
SPEAKER: Fantastic.
All right, thanks, Dave.
It is always a pleasure.
DAVE RENSIN: Thank you.
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