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SRE Fundamentals: SLIs, SLAs and SLOs

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Re: SRE Fundamentals: SLIs, SLAs and SLOs

#4
post #2

This is an interesting article from a company that has almost nil customer support.

From the movie The Negotiator:

A Marine and a sailor are taking a piss. The Marine goes to leave without washing up. The sailor says, 'In the Navy they teach us to wash our hands.' The Marine turns to him and says 'in the Marines they teach us not to piss on our hands'.

BTW it's not true that Google has almost nil customer support. There's extensive support for paying customers (for ads, GCP, GSuite etc.).

But it's amazing to me how reliable things like Gmail are, and how in so many years I've never felt the need to seek support.

Re: SRE Fundamentals: SLIs, SLAs and SLOs

#5
post #2

This is an interesting article from a company that has almost nil customer support.

From the movie The Negotiator: A Marine and a sailor are taking a piss. The Marine goes to leave without washing up. The sailor says, 'In the Navy they teach us to wash our hands.' The Marine turns to him and says 'in the Marines they teach us not to piss on our hands'. BTW it's not true that Google has almost nil customer support. There's extensive support for paying customers (for ads, GCP, GSuite etc.). But it's a…

The joke in that scene always baffled me, because the Marines are born of the Navy and still carry a lot of the Navy's epistemology-why would they be taught something so fundamental so differently?

(Yes it's a joke but sometimes I overthink things, heh)

Re: SRE Fundamentals: SLIs, SLAs and SLOs

#6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the movie The Negotiator: A Marine and a sailor are taking a piss. The Marine goes to leave without washing up. The sailor says, 'In the Navy they teach us to wash our hands.' The Marine turns to him and says 'in the Marines they teach us not to piss on our hands'. BTW it's not true that Google has almost nil customer support. There's extensive support for paying customers (for ads, GCP, GSuite etc.). But it's a…

The joke in that scene always baffled me, because the Marines are born of the Navy and still carry a lot of the Navy's epistemology-why would they be taught something so fundamental so differently? (Yes it's a joke but sometimes I overthink things, heh)

I've also seen it as Harvard and MIT graduates, then someone comes in, washes his hands first, saying "at Yale, they taught us to wash our hands before touching a holy object."

Re: SRE Fundamentals: SLIs, SLAs and SLOs

#7
When reading these articles, never forget that your company is NOT Google! If your company doesn't have a management/infrastructure/communication/skill structure that Google has, then it will be very difficult to implement these fundamentals.

In many cases, an SRE is a job to save costs. If your company doesn't get its shit together and doesn't give your SREs the support it needs, then they'll hate their jobs and the company.

Re: SRE Fundamentals: SLIs, SLAs and SLOs

#8
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The joke in that scene always baffled me, because the Marines are born of the Navy and still carry a lot of the Navy's epistemology-why would they be taught something so fundamental so differently? (Yes it's a joke but sometimes I overthink things, heh)

I've also seen it as Harvard and MIT graduates, then someone comes in, washes his hands first, saying "at Yale, they taught us to wash our hands before touching a holy object."

Quite OT but I almost always wash my hands _before_ (and after) using the restroom. Especially in a public place, it always made sense to me to do it before and after. It seems much more hygienic both for the "holy object" and other people!

Re: SRE Fundamentals: SLIs, SLAs and SLOs

#9
post #7

When reading these articles, never forget that your company is NOT Google! If your company doesn't have a management/infrastructure/communication/skill structure that Google has, then it will be very difficult to implement these fundamentals. In many cases, an SRE is a job to save costs. If your company doesn't get its shit together and doesn't give your SREs the support it needs, then they'll hate their jobs and the…

I have to disagree. The typical and intuitive ways of reasoning about outages and outage risk - screaming at the engineers until they fix it, desperately passing the buck, finding someone to fire in the aftermath - are not a good fit for any context. Every company can benefit from a more principled mental model of system reliability.

Re: SRE Fundamentals: SLIs, SLAs and SLOs

#10
post #7

When reading these articles, never forget that your company is NOT Google! If your company doesn't have a management/infrastructure/communication/skill structure that Google has, then it will be very difficult to implement these fundamentals. In many cases, an SRE is a job to save costs. If your company doesn't get its shit together and doesn't give your SREs the support it needs, then they'll hate their jobs and the…

I have to disagree. The typical and intuitive ways of reasoning about outages and outage risk - screaming at the engineers until they fix it, desperately passing the buck, finding someone to fire in the aftermath - are not a good fit for any context. Every company can benefit from a more principled mental model of system reliability.

If your company's management doesn't even know what an SRE is, then you're stuck in the same exact place, where the SREs are the one being screamed at instead. Some companies just rename "devops" to "SRE".
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