SRE Maturity — From Firefighting to Proactive Engineering

The ops team spent 70% of their time firefighting. SRE gave us a framework to escape this cycle. The key concept: 100% reliability is a bad goal.

SLO, SLI, and Error Budget¶

Formal SLOs for critical services. Error budget (99.9% = 43 minutes of downtime/month) — as long as we have budget, we deploy fast. When it’s exhausted, we stop features and focus on stability.

Blameless Postmortems¶

After every significant incident: what happened, timeline, root cause, action items. No blame. The goal: systemic improvement, not finding a scapegoat. Postmortems are public in Confluence.

Toil Reduction¶

Toil = manual, repetitive, automatable work. We measure it. Target: max 50% of time on toil. Anything above → automate. After 6 months: toil down from 70% to 35%, incidents down 40%.

SRE = Reliability as an Engineering Discipline¶

The transition from reactive firefighting to proactive engineering. Error budgets, postmortems, and automation change the culture.