When to Use
- Define SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets per service or user journey
- Configure burn-rate alerts and reliability dashboards
- Run production readiness reviews before launch or major change
- Analyze incidents for reliability gaps and SLO impact
- Plan capacity for traffic growth and failure scenarios (N+1, regional loss)
- Measure and reduce toil; prioritize automation with highest reliability ROI
- Map dependencies and failure modes; design graceful degradation
- Gate releases on SLO/error-budget policy (canary, rollback triggers)
- Conduct chaos or game days when org maturity supports it
- Partner with engineering on reliability backlog (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers)
When NOT to Use
- Build or fix Jenkins/GitHub Actions/GitLab pipelines →
devops - Design SEV levels, on-call rotations, postmortem program →
incident-management-engineer - IAM grants, VM patching, snapshot restores →
cloud-system-administrator - Stand up VPC, RDS, or new managed services →
cloud-engineer - JMeter/k6 load tests and app profiling →
performance-engineer - Blue-green cutover playbooks and change tiers →
deployment-strategist - K8s cluster upgrades and Helm platform →
cluster-deployment-engineer - Customer status page copy and comms approval →
communication-lead - Org-wide reliability posture, tiering, investment themes →
vp-of-infrastructure
Related skills
| Need | Skill |
|---|---|
| CI/CD, GitOps, pipeline observability | devops |
| Incident program and paging policy | incident-management-engineer |
| Cloud day-2 operations | cloud-system-administrator |
| Cloud service implementation | cloud-engineer |
| Performance testing and tuning | performance-engineer |
| Release cutover strategy | deployment-strategist |
| Kubernetes platform ops | cluster-deployment-engineer |
| Data pipeline SLAs | data-system-ops-lead |
| Security incidents | defensive-security-analyst, cybersecurity |
| BCP/DRP, RTO/RPO for security/IdP, ransomware recovery planning | bcm-disaster-recovery-specialist |
| Architecture review | senior-system-architecture |
| VP infrastructure leadership | vp-of-infrastructure |
Core Workflows
1. Scope and SRE principles
Service ownership, error budget policy, boundaries with DevOps and IM.
See references/sre_scope_and_principles.md.
2. SLI, SLO, and error budgets
Select SLIs, set targets, alert on burn.
See references/sli_slo_error_budgets.md.
3. Observability for reliability
Metrics, logs, traces, alert hygiene.
See references/observability_reliability.md.
4. Incident response (reliability lens)
Mitigation, SLO impact, follow-up actions.
See references/incident_reliability_response.md.
5. Capacity, toil, and automation
Scaling, toil metrics, reliability automation.
See references/capacity_toil_automation.md.
6. Release reliability and resilience testing
PRR, canaries, chaos, failure modes.
See references/release_reliability_chaos.md.
Outputs
- SLO document — SLI definition, target, window, exclusions, owners
- Error budget report — burn %, policy actions (freeze, focus week)
- PRR checklist — pass/fail with required fixes before launch
- Reliability backlog — ranked items with estimated SLO impact
- Incident reliability summary — budget consumed, contributing factors, action items
- Capacity plan — headroom, scaling triggers, regional failover notes
Principles
- User-centric SLIs — measure what customers experience
- Error budgets drive decisions — balance velocity and reliability
- Automate toil — repetitive manual work is a reliability risk
- Blameless learning — fix systems, not people
- Progressive delivery — small releases with measurable rollback criteria