Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. The Cultural Context of SRE

By Ayelet Sachto, Brian Kudzia, Igor Oks, Jennifer Petoff, Luca Cervasio, Nathen Harvey, and Roman Seibel

with Garrett Holthaus

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This will be the 4th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Organizational culture is foundational to the long-term success or failure of an SRE transformation. While SRE relies on technical practices and processes, these are deeply influenced by the people and environment surrounding them. We aren’t saying that having a conducive culture on Day 1 is a prerequisite, but rather that building a supportive culture is helpful in establishing and maintaining a successful SRE practice. In this chapter, we discuss data-driven, research-backed arguments for the critical importance of culture. This chapter will help you identify cultural elements that support SRE, articulate why culture is crucial for SRE success, build a plan to establish and foster a culture of reliability, and recognize and mitigate cultural antipatterns.

The Case for Culture

Let’s start by laying out the essential case for ...