Chapter 64. To All the SREs I’ve Loved

Felix Glaser

We’ve all come across an application pushed out of the door with questionable reliability. It makes our lives tougher when, inevitably, the application experiences its first outage and we are called in to help make the application more reliable. We aren’t surprised by this but wish we would have been involved in the design and planning of the app and made reliability a first-class citizen. It’s so avoidable—and it can wear us down.

I am not an SRE—well, not anymore. I returned to my first passion, security, drawn to strengthening the security of systems, protecting our users’ data, and keeping the bad guys out. The change in perspective from switching teams led to an insight: security is to SRE what SRE is to product teams. We are here to support you to keep your systems secure, up and running, and ultimately reliable. In a way, we are your SRE team. Yet, you so often treat us the same way the single-minded product team treats you.

I’ve heard the complaints. You feel like we’re slowing you down by being paranoid and always thinking of the worst-case scenario. What makes it worse is that we don’t even have good data to convince you it’s worthwhile. It’s not like we can say, “You need to update this library or else the servers will be hacked.”

Scaling up servers for the next DDoS (distributed denial of service) or flash ...

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