Google SRE Prodcast

Google's Tech Incident Response Team (IRT) manages the complex production environment during times of intensive change. In this episode, IRT member Adam Kramer talks about the importance of psychological safety to ensure that engineers can communicate effectively.  

Courtney Nash of The VOID discusses the role of human expertise in managing complex systems, and how SREs continue to bring critical value even as technology and AI evolve.  

John Allspaw discusses reliability with Prodcast host Steve McGhee at SREcon Americas 2026

John Allspaw joins Prodcast hosts Matt Siegler and Florian Rathgeber for a candid discussion of reliability topics at SREcon Americas 2026.

We speak with Ricard Bejarano about being an SRE at home, discussing Home Lab systems.

We sit down with Matt Zelesko, VP of SRE at Google, for a candid talk about how AI is changing SRE — and how it's not.   

Sam Anderson shares his experiences with burnout, and how to support yourself as a reliable system.  Sam provides guidance on how to deal with burnout, and some suggestions on how to avoid burnout through understanding yourself and finding the help and support you need.

Crisis Engineer Mikey Dickerson joins us to talk about what constitutes a crisis. Mikey draws on his broad experience across industry and the public sector, as well as on work with his team of systems fixers.  

What's happening in the world of SRE and resilience engineering? Join us as we catch up with fellow podcast hosts Colette Alexander and Clint Byrum of the This Is Fine! podcast at SREcon in Seattle.   

How do you introduce Site Reliability Engineering to an AI research lab, bringing concepts of scale to engineers who are at the leading edge of AI systems? In the latest episode of The Prodcast, hosts Steve McGhee and Florian Rathgeber chat with Damion Yates, who helped establish the reliability engineering culture at Google DeepMind. Damion shares his journey of bringing scalable infrastructure t...

Join us for a discussion with Carla Geisser of Layer Aleph, a company focused on "crisis engineering". Carla distinguishes a crisis from a standard incident by noting that a crisis is novel and lacks a playbook. She outlines five criteria for a true crisis: fundamental surprise, broken critical functions, high visibility, a rigid deadline (unlike internal tech deadlines), and perception breakdown....

This episode of the Prodcast tackles the challenges of maintaining AI safety and alignment in production. Guests Felipe Tiengo Ferreira and Parker Barnes join hosts Matt Siegler and Steve McGhee to discuss AI model safety, from examining content to emerging security risks. The discussion emphasizes the vital role of SREs in managing safety at scale, detailing multi-layered defenses, including syst...

In this episode of the Prodcast, guest Shannon Brady speaks with hosts Jordan Greenberg and Florian Rathgeber about managing Google's vast fleet of internal devices. Shannon explains how Google's Linux platform uses core SRE principles—specifically testing, canarying, and monitoring—for weekly stage rollouts of its Debian-based distribution. Configuration is efficiently managed using Puppet to ens...

Curious about the real impact of AI on Site Reliability Engineering? In this episode of The Prodcast, Google SRE Denia del Cid breaks down how her team is leveraging AI to transform production workflows. Denia details practical applications like early outage detection, incident similarity analysis, and toil reduction. She explains the critical importance of validating against "golden data sets" an...

Join us on The Prodcast as we host Heather Adkins, leader of Google's Office of Cybersecurity Resilience, for a critical look at the future of digital defenses. We explore the intersection of SRE and security , unpacking the "Secure by Design" philosophy and the shared DNA of incident management. Heather candidly discusses the rise of "Agentic AI hackers" and polymorphic malware , revealing how de...

In this episode, we welcome Alex Hidalgo and Brian Singer of nobl9 to discuss Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Alex and Brian talk about how SLOs can establish a vernacular across industry verticals, leading to constructive conversations and a shared understanding of how to implement SRE practices. Join us for a lively discussion that ranges across SLO topics!

In this episode, Steph Hippo, Platform Engineering Director at Honeycomb, joins The Prodcast to discuss AI and SRE.  Steph explains how observability helps us understand complex systems from their outputs, and provides a foundation for SRE to respond to system problems. This episode explains how AI and observability build a self-reinforcing loop.  We also discuss how AI can detect and respond to c...

In this special episode hosts Steve McGhee from the Google SRE Prodcast and Kaslin Fields from the Google Kubernetes Podcast, welcome Google Cloud Solutions Architect Ben Good to discuss platform engineering. Listeners can look forward to hearing about the role of Kubernetes as a tool for building platforms, how to create "golden paths" for developers, and the importance of observability and self-...

Google Staff SRE Ramón Llamas and Google Software Engineer Swapnil Haria   join our hosts to explore how AI agents are revolutionizing production management, from summarizing alerts and finding hidden errors to proactively preventing outages. Learn about the challenges of evaluating non-deterministic systems and the fascinating interplay between human expertise and emerging AI capabilities in ensu...

This episode features Google Technical Program Manager (TPM) Karanveer Anand , who joins our hosts to discuss the unique role of TPMs in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). The conversation highlights how SRE TPMs bridge the gap between technical details and business impact, managing complex projects with inter-team dependencies and ensuring system reliability, particularly in the rapidly evolving...

This episode discusses Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), a method for analyzing complex systems. Theo Klein , a Google SRE, and Jeffrey Snover , a Distinguished Engineer at Google, explain that STPA focuses on identifying how system accidents and losses occur due to a loss of control, rather than component failures. STPA helps identify design flaws early, even before code is written! The...

In this episode, hosts Steve McGhee and Matt Siegler are joined by guest, Adam Fletcher, CEO and Co-Founder of MarketStreet . They discuss the current state of web development with LLMs, managing technical debt in startups, the evolution of infrastructure and reliability engineering, the role of community in technology, and the future of software engineering with AI.

In this episode, Sal Furino , Customer Reliability Engineer at Bloomberg, discusses all things Service Level Objectives (SLOs) with hosts Steve McGhee and Matt Siegler . Together, they dig into what successful SLOs look like, how it relates to users, and how SLOs provide an effective framework for joint decisions about system reliability across product, engineering, and leadership teams.

Matt Zelesko , the head of Site Reliability Engineering at Google, discusses the evolution of SRE, highlighting the shift from traditional operations to a model that balances velocity and reliability to better serve the rapid advancements in AI and ML. He emphasizes that SRE's core mission is to enable partners to move quickly while meeting reliability goals, and that the sheer scale of Google's i...

In this Google Prodcast episode, Todd Underwood , a reliability expert from Anthropic with experience at Google and OpenAI, discusses the current state and future of AI in SRE. Todd and the hosts focus on the current state and future of AI and ML in production, particularly for SREs. Topics discussed include the challenges of AI-Ops, limitations of current anomaly detection, the potential for AI i...