> If you think a playbook is bad, try being oncall for the first time for a massively (Google-scale) distributed system without a playbook.
You are not Google scale. Don't invent a pen that writes in space when a pencil would do the trick.
You are not Google scale. Don't invent a pen that writes in space when a pencil would do the trick.
Runbooks came from techops in broadcasting, power plant operations, etc where there was a clear division between operators who pushed buttons, ran cables, etc and those that made decisions about buttons to push and cables to run. Dumb hands + runbooks created "smart hands".
If your SRE runs like that it is not SRE.
Look at the incident handling:
1. Identify the issue
2. Implement a workaround to restore the service
3. Identify the root cause
4. Implement a fix for the root cause
5. Remove the workaround
Runbooks cover 1. and 2.
I don't know, I think I was kind of Google scale when working as a Google SRE.
2) Your impact on Google scale was nearly 0 because you were one of a thousand SREs at Google.
The pencil was more expensive.