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Sounds great, even utopian. In almost all environments I've ever worked in, telling executives that you can't deploy a new feature because you've exhausted you

by mslate 10y ago

Sounds great, even utopian. In almost all environments I've ever worked in, telling executives that you can't deploy a new feature because you've exhausted your error budget for the month is not acceptable which renders this system of "failure budgets" moot. I've also spoken with Googlers about their devops/SRE responsibilities and I've gotten the distinct impression that what is advertised as being the organization's "best practice" is not in fact the common practice. Measuring and tracking error budgets comes at a large cost, and enforcing failures budgets is rarely a politically effective initiative as an engineering manager.

throw_away_981 10y ago
"I've also spoken with Googlers about their devops/SRE responsibilities and I've gotten the distinct impression that what is advertised as being the organization's "best practice" is not in fact the common practice." --This is exactly my gripe with this article and accompanying comments - portraying the Google workplace in an almost mythical fashion and failing to see the marketing ploy behind it. I suspect that SREs who work(ed) there don't really want to equate themselves to DevOps because then they would lose their prestige and devalue their market worth. Google management also doesn't want to do that because otherwise no one would take up the job. Call it as you see it people. See my other comment about this point, which adds more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12446385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12446385 (edit:throwaway account because I am revealing personal information in the other comment)
Rapzid 10y ago
They don't talk much about the challenges. It is a ton of work even on the backend to get the amount of SLI coverage and in the shape needed to effectively calculate an error budget. Even then you can introduce changes that might break functionality in stealth ways.. Doubly so for the front end.

by mslate 10y ago

throw_away_981 10y ago

"I've also spoken with Googlers about their devops/SRE responsibilities and I've gotten the distinct impression that what is advertised as being the organization's "best practice" is not in fact the common practice." --This is exactly my gripe with this article and accompanying comments - portraying the Google workplace in an almost mythical fashion and failing to see the marketing ploy behind it. I suspect that SREs who work(ed) there don't really want to equate themselves to DevOps because then they would lose their prestige and devalue their market worth. Google management also doesn't want to do that because otherwise no one would take up the job. Call it as you see it people. See my other comment about this point, which adds more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12446385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12446385 (edit:throwaway account because I am revealing personal information in the other comment)

Rapzid 10y ago

They don't talk much about the challenges. It is a ton of work even on the backend to get the amount of SLI coverage and in the shape needed to effectively calculate an error budget. Even then you can introduce changes that might break functionality in stealth ways.. Doubly so for the front end.