Central SRE Team Versus You Build It, You Run It
TradeoffStaffPrincipalUpdated
A central site reliability engineering (SRE) team of eight takes every page for 150 services owned by 25 teams. Mean time to recovery (MTTR) has doubled in a year, and most incidents trace back to recent deploys.
Short answer: You Build It, You Run It. Move first-line on-call to the owning teams, because the people who shipped the change are the fastest to diagnose and fix it.
The Two Options
A
Central SRE Team
B
You Build It, You Run It
Drill This: Your Pick First
The Better Pick
Option B
You Build It, You Run It
Move first-line on-call to the owning teams, because the people who shipped the change are the fastest to diagnose and fix it. Eight SREs cannot hold context on 150 services, and teams that never get paged have little reason to invest in reliability. Keep the SRE team as the source of tooling, standards, and support on the largest incidents.
When the Other One Wins
Central SRE Team
When a small set of systems needs deep operational expertise, such as shared databases or the core network, a dedicated SRE team owning them outright works better.