Becoming SRE

Chapter 12. How SRE Can Fail

In a book that repeatedly emphasizes the value of learning from failure, we can’t pass up the chance to apply the same idea to SRE itself. Specifically, we are going to look at how SRE efforts fail at the organizational level in real life, with an eye toward applying the lessons failure has graciously offered us. The material for this chapter is drawn from a number of sources, including Chapter 23, “SRE Antipatterns,” by Blake Bisset in Seeking SRE and stories from real life.

Let’s talk about what I mean by fail in this context. Though I am quite fond of how well the opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”) applies here, I can broadly overgeneralize to say that failure in this context looks like one of two things: (1) the organization has some sort of immune response and rejects an SRE effort entirely after a time, or, perhaps more tragic, and (2) it just doesn’t receive anything near to the benefits or value SRE has to offer and SREs live a life of quiet desperation.¹

OK, on to the contributing factors to SRE implementation failure…

Contributing Factor 1: Title Flipping to Create SREs

Let’s get an easy one out of the way. It’s also one I harp on in other places in this book, so I will try to be succinct. It is not uncommon to create an SRE team or an SRE role by just renaming existing roles or open positions with SRE. Sometimes this is done to make those positions more ...