97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 93. SRE in Crisis

Niall Murphy

Microsoft

Inflamed race relations leading to widespread riots. New startups in Silicon Valley. Virulent anti-immigration feeling stoked in the UK. A lethal pandemic, coming from Asia. It sounds like today, but it was 1968.

In Germany, a younger, smaller NATO, then on the cutting edge of computing, held what has a good claim to be the first software engineering conference in history. In keeping with the state of the world at the time, the conference declared a crisis: our ability to write high-quality software, functioning reliably, was under strain as machines became more powerful and complexity grew.

One of those recognizing the crisis was the young computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, who wrote, “The design of any large sophisticated system is going to be a very difficult job, and whenever one meets people responsible for such undertakings, one finds them very much concerned about the reliability issue, and rightly so.”

His solution was to push for consistency, discipline, and rigor in programming. This led to approaches now considered foundational—structured programming, for example—although, as with all novelty, initially treated with suspicion. In honor of Dijkstra, then, I declare the same: SRE is in crisis. Our old approaches will not solve it.

Let’s face it, most of what we have in the profession as templates for behavior or reasoning ...