Becoming SRE

Chapter 13. SRE from a Business Perspective

SREs love to talk about the practical aspects of site reliability engineering. I’d like to think you are holding an entire book of practical advice on how to implement SRE, both as an individual and within an organizational context. But strangely enough, there is almost a complete absence of information in the literature or the discourse at conferences on the connection between SRE and the business. This is even stranger because, at some point, everyone in SRE is going to need to talk to someone on the business side of the house about what they do and how to fund it. Let’s start to fill this void right now. I tracked down two experts on the topic and asked them the questions I think you would want to ask.

Here are the people in this discussion:

• Ben Lutch, former head of SRE for all of Google for 10 years

• Dave Rensin, creator and former director of the Google Customer Reliability Engineering team (the team composed of SREs responsible for helping Google Cloud customers adopt SRE practices)

How Applicable Is Google’s Experience to Mine?

Let’s get this question out of the way first, because I had the exact same reservation (in fact, I edited and curated a whole book with one of the premises being that there was more than Google SRE in the world).

My first question to Dave was, “I was under the impression that SRE was so established at Google that basically funding and the rest of the business aspects were a done deal. Do you think your ...