Google SRE Prodcast

In this episode, Sal Furino, Customer Reliability Engineer at Bloomberg, discusses all things Service Level Objectives (SLOs) with hosts Steve McGhee and Matt Siegler. Together, they dig into what successful SLOs look like, how it relates to users, and how SLOs provide an effective framework for joint decisions about system reliability across product, engineering, and leadership teams.

Matt Zelesko, the head of Site Reliability Engineering at Google, discusses the evolution of SRE, highlighting the shift from traditional operations to a model that balances velocity and reliability to better serve the rapid advancements in AI and ML. He emphasizes that SRE's core mission is to enable partners to move quickly while meeting reliability goals, and that the sheer scale of Google's infrastructure necessitates the SRE model for cross-system problem-solving. Zelesko envisions AI as a crucial assistant for SREs, improving incident detection, mitigation, and postmortem processes, and allowing SREs to focus on more complex engineering challenges and risk management earlier in the development cycle, while still valuing the hands-on experience of operating production infrastructure.

In this Google Prodcast episode, Todd Underwood, a reliability expert from Anthropic with experience at Google and OpenAI, discusses the current state and future of AI in SRE. Todd and the hosts focus on the current state and future of AI and ML in production, particularly for SREs. Topics discussed include the challenges of AI-Ops, limitations of current anomaly detection, the potential for AI in config authoring and troubleshooting, trade-offs between product velocity and reliability, the evolving role of SREs in an AI-driven world, and book publication for optimal timing.

This episode features guest, Peter Pellerzi (Distinguished Engineer, Google). Peter and the hosts, Matt Siegler and Steve McGhee, focus on the physical infrastructure side of SRE, discussing topics such as the scale of Google's data centers, handling incidents like power outages, testing and preparedness strategies, the use of AI for optimizing cooling plants, and more. Peter also emphasizes the importance of community support, proactive planning, and learning from real-world testing and incidents to ensure high availability and resilience in data center operations.

Jessica Theodat (Senior SRE & Security Tech Lead, Google) joins hosts Jordan Greenberg and Steve McGhee to discuss the intersection of security and site reliability engineering at Google. Jessica touches on risk management, the unique nature of security incident responses, and the shared goals between security and SRE. The crew also delves into the balance between security and SRE, acknowledging the tension and the need for collaboration between teams to achieve business goals and user trust.

In this "bumpisode", hosts and producers of Prodcast (including our new co-host, Matt Siegler!) reflect on the previous season and introduce the new season's focus on upcoming trends in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and AI, and the friends we make along the way. They also introduce new elements we are bringing in with Season 4, such as a video format and a feedback form.

This episode features Javi Beltran, a Google engineering lead who created the "Telebot" theme song. With our beloved hosts, Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg, Beltran discusses the origins of the song, created in 2012 for Google's paging system. The song was meant to add a touch of levity to what could be a stressful situation for engineers on-call. Beltran also unveils a new, more modern remix of “Telebot” (created in collaboration with our host, Jordan Greenberg!) which will be used as the intro theme for the podcast's next season.

In this episode of the Prodcast, guests Dominic Hutton (Staff SRE, HashiCorp) and Niccolo' Cascarano (Senior Staff SRE at Google) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to dive into configurations. They discuss the differences between imperative and declarative configuration, explore the benefits and challenges of each approach, and the need for careful consideration when choosing between the two. Ultimately, the goal is to achieve reliable and maintainable systems through effective configuration management.

This episode features Casey Rosenthal (Founder, Cirrusly.ai) and John Allspaw (Founder and Principal, Adaptive Capacity Labs), joining our hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg. Together they discuss how resilience appears in Software Engineering and SRE and explore the importance of understanding the human factors involved in adapting to system failures—highlighting the need for a more qualitative and holistic approach to understanding how engineers successfully adapt to system behavior and improving overall reliability.

In this episode of the Prodcast, we are joined by guests Christina Schulman (Staff SRE, Google) and Dr. Laura Maguire (Principal Engineer, Trace Cognitive Engineering). They emphasize the human element of SRE and the importance of fostering a culture of collaboration, learning, and resilience in managing complex systems. They touch upon topics such as the need for diverse perspectives and collaboration in incident response, the necessity of embracing complexity, and explore concepts such as aerodynamic stability, and more.

In this episode, Cody Smith (CTO and Co-founder, Camus Energy) & Trisha Weir (SRE Department Lead, Google) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg, to discuss their experience developing Maglev, a highly available and distributed network load balancer (NLB) that is an integral part of the cloud architecture that manages traffic that comes in to a datacenter. Starting with Maglev’s humble beginnings as a skunkworks effort, Cody and Trisha recount the challenges they faced, and emphasize the importance of psychological safety, collaboration, and adaptability in SRE innovation.

In this episode, guests Narayan Desai (Principal SRE, Google) and Pat Somaru (Senior Production Engineer, Meta) join hosts Steve McGhee and Florian Rathgeber to discuss the challenges of observability and working with profiling data. The discussion covers intriguing topics like noise reduction, workload modeling, and the need for better tools and techniques to handle high-cardinality data.

This episode features Google engineers Wilmer van der Gaast (Production on-tall) and Andy Sykes (Senior Staff Systems Engineer, SRE), joining hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg, to discuss the development and maintenance of Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8). They highlight the initial motivations for creating the service, technical challenges like cache poisoning and load balancing, as well as the collaborative effort between SRE and SWE teams to address these issues. They also reflect on the evolving nature of SRE and advice for aspiring SREs.

Guests Jordan Chernev (Senior Technology Executive) and Scott Bowers (SRE, Gearbox Software) who hail from the retail and gaming industries, respectively, join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg  to discuss the unique challenges of Site Reliability Engineering in their industries. They share the importance of aligning SLOs with user experience, strategies for handling spikes in traffic, communicating with users during outages, and investing in reliability.

Sarah Butt (Principal Engineer, Centralized Incident Response, Salesforce) and Vrai Stacey (Staff Software Engineer, Google) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to dive into incident response—particularly tooling and software for reliability incidents. Tune in for an in-depth discussion on topics such as the importance of communication and collaboration during incidents, and the role of tooling in supporting incident response processes. Sarah and Vrai also share personal takeaways from incidents they have experienced.