97 things every #SRE should know: 88 That 50% Thing - Tanya Reilly #SRE-97

"the rule that SREs spend no more than 50% of their time on ops work. When I began my first SRE role in 2006, that meant every SRE should spend 50% of their time coding."

"Systems administrators used heroics to keep their sites up while they automated away the jagged edges. Fire fighting was just part of the job."

And we did it uphill both ways. In the snow.

"Site reliability brought us a new model. With reliability as a first-class feature, the teams running production expected the same status—and the same salary—as the teams creating the features that ran there."

How's that working out for everyone?

The William Gibson quote 'The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." always comes to mind on this topic. A lot of places don't even say they work this way and a chunk of the ones that do are lying.

But there are some forward thinking ones out there

Quotables:

"Over time, “at least 50% code” became “at most, 50% ops.” And, honestly, that’s fine."

"It’s mature to evolve “50% code” into “50% deliberate project work to make your services better.” #this

Code written still has to be carried with you.

"Reduction of toil needs to be an engineering-wide goal, not an SRE hot topic. Reliability and operability can’t be an afterthought."