Question

A rapidly growing SaaS company's operations team spends most of their day manually restarting failed services, applying repetitive configuration changes, and responding to the same alerts over and over. Leadership adopts Google's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices to improve operational excellence as the platform scales. Following SRE principles, what should the team do about this repetitive manual work?

Accepted Answer

Identify it as toil and invest engineering effort to automate it away so staff can focus on higher-value work

Answer

Hire additional operations staff to keep pace with the growing volume of manual tasks

Answer

Accept the manual work as a permanent part of running reliable services at scale

Answer

Lower the reliability targets so fewer alerts and failures occur that require manual intervention