Becoming SRE

Chapter 8. A Day in the Life of an SRE

When people ask what a day in the life of an SRE looks like, they are mostly asking the question, “I get what SRE is all about, but what do you actually do?” While I could go all Phoenix Project¹ on this question and write a semifictional narrative about a semifictional SRE character, instead I will attempt to directly answer that question.

To get there, let me first mention the adjacent question: What does an average day look like for an SRE? I’m pretty skeptical that there is such a thing as an average day. I don’t ever recall coming home at night and thinking, “Gosh, that was an extra average day.” Different SRE jobs can be significantly different from one another. But even with taking that out of the equation, I’m not sure you could average the highest high days on the job with the lowest lows to produce anything like an average day.

Modes of an SRE’s Day

Instead of trying to come up with some mythical composite day, let’s instead look at some of the “modes” of the job that are in play on a daily basis. Just to be clear, these modes are meant to be descriptive, not exclusive. You can be in several at once or switching rapidly and seamlessly between them. If it helps, you can think of them as “hats we are wearing at any one moment.”

Incident/Outage Mode

There are some days² on the job when you will be involved in an incident for most or all of the hours of that day. Those days feel qualitatively different from the days when you are not ...