Reliability · Flashcard
In SRE, what is toil?
- AManual, repetitive, automatable operational work that has no enduring value and scales with service size
- BAny difficult engineering project that requires deep design thinking and permanently improves the service
- CThe paperwork of meetings, planning, and email that surrounds a team but never touches production systems
- DOne-off creative debugging of a novel outage that the team has never encountered or documented before
Why this is the answer
Toil is the operational, manual, repetitive, automatable work that adds no lasting value and grows as the service grows. Hard engineering projects are the opposite of toil because they leave enduring value. Meetings and email are administrative overhead, a different category from toil. And novel one-off debugging is not toil precisely because it is not repetitive or automatable.
Official docs