The SRE:developer ratio matters more than most organizations realize.
Google's guideline: 1 SRE per 5-10 developers for mature services. Reality for most: 1 SRE per 15-20 developers is common but leads to reliability debt.
Under-staffed SRE costs: more incidents (each costing $10K-500K), slower incident recovery, burn-out and attrition ($200-400K per departure), and reliability debt that compounds.
Right-size by: services per SRE (max 5-7), on-call rotation (min 5 people), toil budget (<50% of time), and automation investment (30%+ of time).
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8 minPublished Work
This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →
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