Reliability Engineering for Humans
summary
PagerDuty dashboards show a platform health score rising from ~20 to >90 across 2017 as mean time to acknowledge and recover drop, attributed to SRE practices: PagerDuty operations health management, automated recovery and failover, playbooks, rehearsed fire drills and blameless postmortems. SLOs/SLIs and enforced error budgets turn debate into data — e.g. 99.99% → 4.32 minutes error budget — and teams cap manual work so toxic toil stays low (limit toil to 50%), improving sleep, psychological safety and long‑term reliability.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Pivotal Reliability Engineering for Humans Is Site Reliability Engineering Good for You?
- 1:54Naming things is hard
- 5:35The wellbeing of human operators impacts the reliability of systems.
- 6:01Reliability Workbook
- 6:33SRE is what happens when a software engineer is tasked with what used to be called operations
- 7:20Failure is Normal
- 7:47Reliability is Fundamental
- 15:28Set Your Service Level Objectives Measure Your Service Level Indicators
- 20:23Psychological safety is a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking
- 22:05Google's Project Aristotle
- 23:17Let's talk about toil
- 25:26If we have to staff humans to do the work, we are feeding the machines with the blood, sweat and tears of human beings
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