Google Research

Being an On-Call Engineer: A Google SRE Perspective

  • Andrea Spadaccini
  • Kavita Guliani
;login:, vol. 40 (2015), pp. 43-47

Abstract

Being on-call is a critical duty that many operations and engineering teams must undertake in order to keep their services reliable and available. However, there are several pitfalls in the organization of on-call rotations and responsibilities that can lead to serious consequences for the services and for the teams if not avoided. We provide the primary tenets of the approach to on-call that Google’s Site Reliability Engineers have developed over years, and explain how that approach has led to reliable services and sustainable workload over time.

Research Areas

Learn more about how we do research

We maintain a portfolio of research projects, providing individuals and teams the freedom to emphasize specific types of work