How we made service reliability a team job, not an on-call punishment.
The payment-api alert was still firing when we opened the incident channel, and nobody could tell whether customers were actually blocked or whether a dashboard had found another way to ruin breakfast.
SRE means site reliability engineering: a way of running software where the people who build services also set clear expectations for how those services should behave in real use. We measure whether they meet those expectations, respond when they do not, and spend planned time removing repeated sources of failure.
At 08:06, we had a red graph, four Slack replies, and no useful answer to the only question that mattered: could a customer complete a payment? That gap is why we started treating SRE as a working practice rather than a title somebody receives after learning enough Kubernetes nouns.
Start With What A User Can Actually Do
