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I'm an SRE at Google and when my friend asked what I do and I explained it to him he said - "oh, so like QA in my company?" I've asked what QA does at his com
by throwaway38489 6y ago
I'm an SRE at Google and when my friend asked what I do and I explained it to him he said
- "oh, so like QA in my company?"
I've asked what QA does at his company and well yeah, exactly. I've read the books and know about the SLA/SLO and honestly it doesn't make any sense for smaller companies with few services.
I code up alerts for various metrics, act upon said alerts, sometimes do the fixes my self if it's simple, otherwise just hand it off to devs by logging a bug. The remaining time I code tools for other SREs to use.
- the_only_law 6y agoThis is the sort of reason I don't put much stock in titles, personally.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoAre you expected to know the product codebase fairly well, debug complex bugs on the fly when paged, and push fixes out in a short window of time (<1 hour)? Also interested in what tooling you develop for the use by other SREs (if you can share).
- martius 6y agoTeams have different level of engagement on different services. In my case: * I have a good in-depth knowledge of one product I'm oncall for. My team may implement some design changes required (ex: for scaling) and I contribute code to this project. * I have shallow knowledge of 2 other products, I'm trained at identifying a trigger that causes an outage and mitigate it (common mitigations are: move traffic, increase quota temporarily, rollback a release). If I can't solve an incident without in-depth knowledge of these products, I escalate to the devteam, and they will be responsible for root-causing. A mitigation that requires a patch, cherry pick and rollout would be a terrible (and risky) thing to do, so I'd rather find any alternative first.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoThanks for the reply, I appreciate it!