The visual summary below is based on a post by Will Larson, who started the SRE function at Uber. His post elaborates on a “trunks and branches” model for developing infrastructure-facing teams.
It also covered an interesting perspective on the balancing act of budget and service quality. I will explain the visual summary underneath it.

An explanation of the above visual summary
- Long-term cloud infrastructure success depends on balancing both elements of high Service Quality and a reasonable Investment Budget
- Service Quality can get torpedoed by morale busters like non-stop grunt work, not enough engineers, etc.
- Investment budget can get torpedoed by continuously high cloud costs and an excess of branch teams working on problems that aren’t solving immediate problems
- The key is to always keep an eye on these “busters” that can torpedo your long-term return on cloud investment
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