John P. Looney, Reddit, Inc.
Most SREs are "product" SRE; concerned with customers, external to your organisation. They care about latency, reliability, ensuring you have capacity enough to keep your customers happy. Most product teams work in human-reaction-speed latency; 30 to 500 milliseconds. They direction from a VP somewhere that moves a lever between RELIABILITY and VELOCITY while trying to work out how to make both better. Happy product SREs are able to ship changes multiple times an hour.
A good number of SRECon folk are "infrastructure" SRE. The doozers who ensure that their product teams spend most of their time caring about external matters, not internals that don't add customer value. This talk explores why that world is different, and why those SREs need different skills.
John P. Looney, Reddit
John Looney is an infrastructure software development manager for Reddit, based in Dublin. Before that, he has supported various large-scale distributed systems vital to Google, Facebook and Intercom. He has taught classes in site reliability, computer hardware, networking distributed systems, and sits on the Steering Committee for SREcon.
author = {John P. Looney},
title = {{SRE} Is Weird, Down the Stack},
year = {2022},
address = {Amsterdam},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}
