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BENJAMIN TREYNOR SLOSS: What is SRE?
Well, SRE has become a lot of things over the past 15 years.
But when we started it in 2004, it was a pretty simple concept.
It's what you get when you treat operations
as a software problem and you staff it
with software engineers.
And everything else came from that.
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SRE is a way of thinking and approaching production.
It's a set of principles and practices.
And so in a sense, most people who
are engineers who could be developing a system
can also be an SRE working on that same system.
And when we talk to somebody about joining SRE,
we're really looking for a few things.
First of all, do they have a natural tendency
to avoid toil and want to automate it away and make
a computer do it?
If they're allergic to doing things by hand over and over
again, and if they have the computer
skills to take the work that they've been doing by hand
and make a computer do it instead,
they got a good character trait for SRE.
Secondly, can they handle complexity?
And in particular, can they take a complex
and maybe not well-defined problem
and come up with a scalable, technically reasonable solution
for it and implement that solution?
We call those skills non-abstract large systems
design.
And it's a skill that pretty much every SRE
uses every single day.
Finally, we look for an innate curiosity
about how things work.
We're looking for people who will learn over
the course of their lifetime in SRE
and understand systems as they develop and as they change.
When we find someone with those attributes,
we have someone with the potential
to be a really excellent SRE.
JENNIFER PETOFF: So once we find someone
who generally fits that shape, that's
when the real work begins.
When it comes to SRE, there's a lot
to learn, from reliability best practices and design patterns,
to the ins and outs of complex production systems,
to incident management best practices and more.
Over the years, we've developed hundreds of hours and thousands
of pages of material to help develop those inclinations
into excellent production skills.
Once someone gets up to speed on an SRE team at Google,
then we spend a lot of effort on continuing education,
things like rotations and short-term projects.
Great SREs aren't hired, they're actually trained.
And their skills are honed over time.
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BENJAMIN LUTCH: Google was a lot smaller than it
is today when we started SRE.
In the beginning, SRE was just a few people in a couple offices.
Today, we're more than 2,500 folks spread around the world.
Basic SRE principles scale from very small to super large.
As long as you keep them in mind and let
them guide you along the way, you'll
end up in the right place.
If I were starting another company from scratch again,
I would definitely be doing SRE from day one.
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BETSY BEYER: For a long time, we wouldn't talk
about SRE outside of Google.
It was the secret sauce.
But a few years ago, we started to rethink that.
Now we spend a lot of time working
to build a large and vibrant SRE community.
We've published several books and also
dozens of articles, videos, and trainings,
with much more to come.
Almost all of this material is available for free
on Google SRE's home page.
We know that an important part of SRE's value
is creating something meaningful and lasting
for a larger community.
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BENJAMIN TREYNOR SLOSS: Well, that's
the uncomfortably exciting part.
I have a lot of ideas, but the truth
is I don't really know for certain.
Now that SRE has grown to be a global community and not
just a Google thing, the future of the profession
is determined by the progress and innovations of everyone
in SRE.
And if you had asked me in 2004 what
would become of the SRE team, I would not have predicted this.
I thought it was going to be a very small niche
part of computer science.
So what I do predict is that the community
of smart and motivated people who now make up the global SRE
teams will continue to come up with new ideas.
They'll continue to innovate.
They'll continue to advance the state of the art
and advance what is possible.
And I'll be part of that, but just part of it.
So really, I'm looking forward to seeing what you all create.
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