Notes on Google SRE Experience

Google created the SRE role. The idea of software engineering for operations is an exciting approach. My observation for a few months of SRE work is as follows:

SRE does a lot of development

Unlike a typical ops role, a development project is normal to your work. Each quarter's planning includes a couple of medium sizes development projects. The projects could be related to creating a new system flow, improving configs, rollouts, security, scalability, etc.

Oncall is the first priority

SREs are mostly first responders to critical problems. In the first few months, SREs learn to perform oncall duties after understanding the systems. The oncall tasks include triage of a problem, mitigating it, and seek for solutions, yourself, or asking the devs.

System understanding is vital for survival

SREs need to learn a lot of components, their interaction, and how things will go wrong. It needs a good memory, an excellent way to organize information, and putting in hours of work to understand systems interactions.

The Good, Bad, and Ugly of SRE

I liked the engineering excellence of the systems, their scale, and their complexity. The whole SRE work is well structured. There is a clear path to progress in your career. Lots of brilliant engineers work in SRE and motivate you.