by Zachary Nickens | Tuesday, May 4, 2021 | Site Reliability Engineering

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) love to hate toil, but what exactly is toil? And why are SREs obsessed with removing toil? In a nutshell, Site Reliability Engineering is what happens when you treat IT operations like a software problem. But… how do you treat operations like a software problem? SRE can feel opaque, but in practice, it is the essence of engineering. In general, this means that you remove inefficiencies in one component, so that other components may perform quantifiably better.