Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Chapter 23. Future of SRE

By Matt Zelesko

Throughout this book, we’ve explored a number of transitions. Transitions are nothing new—Google specifically, and the technology industry generally, have embraced and thrived through many of them. Frequently, the ultimate outcome looked very different from what we thought it would at the outset. With this in mind, we look into the future of SRE with a sense of humility. It’s not possible to fully predict what will come, but we can make an informed guess about what’s not likely to change about the SRE practice and what we suspect definitely will.

What Won’t Change

First, reliability remains as important as ever. In fact, the importance of reliability is increasing as the world becomes ever more reliant on technology. The products and infrastructure provided by Google and other innovative organizations are becoming increasingly critical to the daily lives of billions of users and to organizations globally. This means that our infrastructure is becoming societal infrastructure to governments, nongovernmental organizations, companies, and people around the world. We don’t take this responsibility lightly—it is central to our culture and our intention that “Google just works.” If we project forward, it is reasonable to assume that this global reliance will continue to increase (and perhaps dramatically), yet expectations will remain the same. As complexity grows, our approaches to reliability will change, but our mission will not.

Second, ...