SREcon24 Europe/Middle East/Africa

JC van Winkel and Brad Lipinski, Google


Hands on learning is best for adults, and we've used this principle in Google SRE since 2017. However, many oncall engineers aren't SREs and haven't gone through a full week-long SRE onboarding program. How can they learn the same skills and go oncall with confidence, but without the week-long curriculum?

We cherry picked our SRE onboarding program to create a succinct, scalable program for this audience that includes the best of orientation: the breakage exercises. This program is called "Oncall Ready!" and is completely self-service, requiring no operational work from the SRE EDU team. In this talk we will discuss the development, the behind the scenes, and the outcomes of this project. Best comment we got from a participant: "Oh wow, this is like going through a [production] escape room without having to pay for it".


https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon24emea/presentation/van-winkel