Becoming a Rockstar SRE by Jeremy Proffitt & Rod Anami

Author:Jeremy Proffitt & Rod Anami
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Packt
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Why toil is bad

We say a chore is manual if it needs intervention from a human being, an SRE in this context, either to run a set of instructions or trigger a script. These chores are repetitive if they require multiple executions during a period. Those two aspects make any task time- and energy-consuming, but why is this work problematic?

Manual consequences

First, if SREs must execute manual duties to keep a system running, they will most likely fail at some point. Therefore, manual system management is the antithesis of reliability. The following detrimental results are also consequences of manual tasks:

Scalability hindrance: If the building or maintaining of an application demands T number of manual tasks, then for A instances of the same application, the number of required operations is T multiplied by A (T x A). That means the toil will increase proportionally to the size of the environment, which, in technical terms, is an N order of magnitude scale or O(n). No business will survive if we need to add more SREs for each new system deployed.

Error-prone: The more dependency we have on human interventions, the higher the likelihood of inserting errors. And mistakes generate more manual work. Typically, one error unfolds into multiple tasks in the queue on an exponential scale.

Technical debt: It’s common sense that keeping documentation is more complicated than code. Procedures or runbooks rapidly become full of technical debt as the knowledge tends to move from the documentation back to the minds of individuals. When an SRE leaves the team, tacit knowledge often goes with that person.

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