Advice to build your best SRE team

Because you can only get so far by copying Google’s SRE model.

You will learn how the SRE culture works at famous companies.

We also have a few SRE podcasts and a free 7-day course on SRE culture 👇

Learn the 7 levers of SRE culture without having to snoop around FAANG* HQs

* FAANG = Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google

Hi. I’m Ash 👋🏽

I have learned over the years that well-designed teams are the backbone of modern tech work.

This could not be more true for a space like SRE, where the work is broad, complex, and ambiguous.

My goal with SREpath is to help more teams thrive in such situations.

Storytime. It was 2015, and I was involved with a startup gaining traction in the financial sector.

My particular role put me in line to get a hefty payday if we continued to win over clients.

I’m not crazy rich right now, so what do you think happened? 😅

Long story cut short: our features were great, amazing even.

We had a proven zero-knowledge security solution way back then! Our webRTC conferencing feature was ahead of its time and very solid too.

But our service reliability was not so great. Our clients lost faith and we lost referrals because of it.

Who knew that end-users cared so much about uptime and performance?

We knew this fact but couldn’t do the right things fast enough.

If only we had a little more time and skill to plan out site reliability and the team that would make it happen.

Right now, I could’ve been swimming in money like Scrooge McDu…

After this failure, I did a lot of soul-searching and ran a postmortem.

Many of the issues came down to the team that would’ve handled site reliability issues.

Experienced engineers got headhunted, newer engineers got lost in the fray, our capacity planning capability was non-existent, and incident response capability was overstretched.

There’s more, but you get the picture.

The funny thing is that I’d been a Director of Operations in a more traditional work setting before I started working with this startup.

I ran teams of teams for a living!

But I lost sight of the big picture in the fast-paced fray of startup/tech work life. I have a feeling that others end up doing the same. This site is for you.

My research into the work of teams, and more specifically, SRE teams, aims to bring clarity and focus to your efforts.

I’ve already spent 1000s of hours researching and writing on observability, incident management, K8s, team structuring, and more.

Some of my greatest hits (on Reddit and HN) include exploring Netflix’s SRE practice, describing runbooks, and even a push for psychological safety in how we word SRE terms.

The idea here is to distill my key findings into easy-to-digest content, which will slowly pour through this website’s newsletter.

It’s being made for your benefit and your team’s.

What’s in it for me? It helps me feel like I’m making an impact. And maybe one day, I could turn this passion project into a business. Still working on it.

So what are you waiting for? Give me 7 days and I will give you a new level of clarity on Site Reliability culture.

Access the 7-day SRE culture course

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Whether you decide to learn more about SRE through SREpath or not, I wish you the very best for your team’s journey.

Sincerely,