Google SRE Prodcast

This episode features guest, Peter Pellerzi (Distinguished Engineer, Google). Peter and the hosts, Matt Siegler and Steve McGhee , focus on the physical infrastructure side of SRE, discussing topics such as the scale of Google's data centers, handling incidents like power outages, testing and preparedness strategies, the use of AI for optimizing cooling plants, and more. Peter also emphasizes the...

Jessica Theodat (Senior SRE & Security Tech Lead, Google) joins hosts Jordan Greenberg and Steve McGhee to discuss the intersection of security and site reliability engineering at Google. Jessica touches on risk management, the unique nature of security incident responses, and the shared goals between security and SRE. The crew also delves into the balance between security and SRE, acknowledging t...

In this "bumpisode", hosts and producers of Prodcast (including our new co-host, Matt Siegler !) reflect on the previous season and introduce the new season's focus on upcoming trends in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and AI, and the friends we make along the way. They also introduce new elements we are bringing in with Season 4, such as a video format and a feedback form.

This episode features Javi Beltran , a Google engineering lead who created the "Telebot" theme song. With our beloved hosts, Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg , Beltran discusses the origins of the song, created in 2012 for Google's paging system. The song was meant to add a touch of levity to what could be a stressful situation for engineers on-call. Beltran also unveils a new, more modern remix...

In this episode of the Prodcast, guests Dominic Hutton (Staff SRE, HashiCorp) and Niccolo' Cascarano (Senior Staff SRE at Google) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to dive into configurations. They discuss the differences between imperative and declarative configuration, explore the benefits and challenges of each approach, and the need for careful consideration when choosing between th...

This episode features Casey Rosenthal (Founder, Cirrusly.ai) and John Allspaw (Founder and Principal, Adaptive Capacity Labs), joining our hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg . Together they discuss how resilience appears in Software Engineering and SRE and explore the importance of understanding the human factors involved in adapting to system failures—highlighting the need for a more qualita...

In this episode of the Prodcast, we are joined by guests  Christina Schulman (Staff SRE, Google) and Dr. Laura Maguire (Principal Engineer, Trace Cognitive Engineering). They emphasize the human element of SRE and the importance of fostering a culture of collaboration, learning, and resilience in managing complex systems. They touch upon topics such as the need for diverse perspectives and collabo...

In this episode, Cody Smith (CTO and Co-founder, Camus Energy) & Trisha Weir (SRE Department Lead, Google) join hosts  Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg , to discuss their experience developing Maglev , a highly available and distributed network load balancer (NLB) that is an integral part of the cloud architecture that manages traffic that comes in to a datacenter. Starting with Maglev's humble b...

In this episode, guests Narayan Desai (Principal SRE, Google) and Pat Somaru (Senior Production Engineer, Meta) join hosts Steve McGhee and Florian Rathgeber to discuss the challenges of observability and working with profiling data. The discussion covers intriguing topics like noise reduction, workload modeling, and the need for better tools and techniques to handle high-cardinality data.

This episode features Google engineers Wilmer van der Gaast (Production on-tall) and Andy Sykes (Senior Staff Systems Engineer, SRE), joining hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg , to discuss the development and maintenance of Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8). They highlight the initial motivations for creating the service, technical challenges like cache poisoning and load balancing, as well as the...

Guests Jordan Chernev (Senior Technology Executive) and Scott Bowers (SRE, Gearbox Software) who hail from the retail and gaming industries, respectively, join   hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg  to discuss the unique challenges of Site Reliability Engineering in their industries. They share the importance of aligning SLOs with user experience, strategies for handling spikes in traffic, com...

Sarah Butt (Principal Engineer, Centralized Incident Response, Salesforce) and Vrai Stacey (Staff Software Engineer, Google) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to dive into incident response—particularly tooling and software for reliability incidents. Tune in for an in-depth discussion on topics such as the importance of communication and collaboration during incidents, and the role of t...

Silvia Botros (SRE Architect, Twilio | Author of "High Performance MySQL, 4th edition") and Niall Murphy (Co-founder & CEO, Stanza) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg , to discuss cultural shifts in database engineering, rate limiting, load shedding, holistic approaches to reliability, proactive measures to build customer trust, and much more!

Liz Fong-Jones (former Google SRE and current Field CTO at honeycomb.io) joins hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg for a lively discussion centered around observability, its evolution from monitoring, and its role in modern software development. Tune in for more on the importance of observability as a spectrum, the evolving role of SREs, and advice to aspiring software engineers.

Ben Treynor Sloss (VP of Engineering, Google) joins hosts Steve McGhee and Dr. Jennifer Petoff (Director of Technical Infrastructure Education, Google) to share the evolution of SRE and its impact on software development, how AI and ML significantly impacts SRE practices, and the future of SRE. Ben  coined the term "Site Reliability Engineering" for his team of (now) 4,000 software engineers, enga...

In this episode,  Healfdene Goguen (Principal Engineer, Google) joins hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to discuss the vast amount of work to be done by SREs, and the fascinating challenges to tackle with clear real-world implications. It's a truly exciting time to be an SRE at Google!

In this season of Google Prodcast, current and former SREs, both within and outside of Google, chat with hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to discuss software systems designed and built by SREs.  For "episode zero", guests  Amy Tobey (Live Services SRE, Netflix) and Dr. Vladyslav Ukis (Head of R&D, Siemens Healthineers, Author of "Establishing SRE Foundations") will set the stage for the sea...

Former Google SREs, or "Xooglers", talk with hosts MP and Steve McGhee about site reliability engineering outside of Google. What's the difference in scale? What skills are generally valuable? And why can't you build "SRE in a box" that jump-starts pretty much any organization? Join Carla Geisser, Cody Smith, and Laura Nolan in their lively conversation about what SRE skills and knowledge they hav...

Sabrina Farmer, VP of Engineering at Google, talks about her career journey through Site Reliability Engineering.  What does management mean? What's involved in being an effective manager? and what's a feasibility study? Hear some great advice on how to get what you expect out of a role, wherever on the ladder it is. 

Dave Reisner talks about his path to Staff SRE, from ArchLinux contributor through DevOps to software engineer. This episode emphasizes the value of strong mentoring and manager relationships, and the challenges of work-life balance.  

Explore the role and responsibilities of an SRE manager with Stephen Benjamin.

Explore the role and responsibilities of a Senior SRE with Jessica Theodat, as she discusses life-work balance, the value of mentoring, and being a Black woman in SRE.

Explore the career path of SREs Shannon Brady and Theo Klein as they discusses their paths to Site Reliability Engineering and finding their areas of expertise. 

In this episode, Mariuxi and Julian discuss their paths to SRE: what drew them initially to SRE, and what motivates them to continue developing skills  

How does one become an SRE? And what's the career like? In this episode, Tom and Megan discuss their path to SRE.