For better or worse, most companies—including their execs and developers—see SREs as superheroes who’ll save them from the evils of downtime and service degradation with their boundless superpowers. SREs are expected to constantly perform dangerous stunts like production debugging or communicating highly technical issues to angry VPs. They must also be able to manage infrastructure, networks, databases, pipelines, operating systems and much more.

Pets.com was an online pet supply retailer founded in 1998, during the dot-com craze. In February 2000, it raised $83 million to go public based mainly on metrics like user acquisition, website traffic, and brand recognition. However, the profit margins were minimal and the marketing costs exorbitant, which led Pets.com to file for bankruptcy nine months after its IPO. The industry now recognizes these metrics as vanity metrics.

The concept of Round Robin comes from sports. And it has nothing to do with anyone called Robin, but the french word ruban (ribbon). In a Round Robin tournament, all participants face each other by taking turns. When applied to on-call schedules, a Round Robin escalation policy means that responders assigned to a level will take turns responding to alerts. When is this strategy useful and when isn’t?

The world population in 2024 is approximately 8.12 billion people. Of these, 4.3 billion people use Google regularly, while 3.74 billion are active users on Meta's platforms. Any disturbance involving these tech giants will surely make headlines, as seen in the recent Google’s Unisuper incident. The scale of these tech companies brings fascinating challenges in every aspect of their operations, including incident response.