Why we switched from "OPs" to "Infrastructure"
We need people that gets bored by doing repetitive tasks
This is the kind of people we are looking for
http://danluu.com/google-sre-book/
QUOTE:
Google’s approach: SREs
- Have software engineers do operations
- Candidates should be able to pass or nearly pass normal dev hiring bar, and may have some additional skills that are rare among devs (e.g., L1 - L3 networking or UNIX system internals).
- Career progress comparable to dev career track Results
- SREs would be bored by doing tasks by hand
- Have the skillset necessary to automate tasks
- Do the same work as an operations team, but with automation instead of manual labor
- To avoid manual labor trap that causes team size to scale with service load, Google places a 50% cap on the amount of “ops” work for SREs
- Upper bound. Actual amount of ops work is expected to be much lower
Pros
- Cheaper to scale
- Circumvents devs/ops split
Cons
- Hard to hire for
- May be unorthodox in ways that require management support (e.g., product team may push back against decision to stop releases for the quarter because the error budget is depleted)