Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

by Betsy Beyer

We define toil as mundane, repetitive operational work providing no enduring value, which scales linearly with service growth.

“If we are engineering processes and solutions that are not automatable, we continue having to staff humans to maintain the system. If we have to staff humans to do the work, we are feeding the machines with the blood, sweat, and tears of human beings. Think The Matrix with less special effects and more pissed off System Administrators.”

The cost of failure is education.

Or is it the reward ?

A blamelessly written postmortem assumes that everyone involved in an incident had good intentions and did the right thing with the information they had.

Blameless culture originated in the healthcare and avionics industries where mistakes can be fatal.

Best Practice: No Postmortem Left Unreviewed