Case Study

The Launch and Hand$-$off Readiness Review at Google $(2010)$

One of the many surprising facts about Google is that they have a functional orientation for their Ops engineers, who are referred to as $$Site Reliability Engineers$($SRE$),$ a term coined by Ben Treynor Sloss in $2004.$ That year, Treynor Sloss started off with a staff of seven SREs that grew to over $1,200$ SREs by $2014.$ As Treynor Sloss said, $$If Google ever goes down, it$$s my fault.$$ Treynor Sloss has resisted creating a single sentence definition of what SREs are, but, he once described SREs as $$what happens when a software engineer is tasked with what used to be called operations.$$

Every SRE reports to Treynor Sloss$$s organization to help ensure consistency of quality of staffing and hiring, and they are embedded into product teams across Google $($which also provide their funding$).$ However, SREs are still so scarce they are assigned only to the product teams that have the highest importance to the company or those that must comply with regulatory requirements. Furthermore, those services must have low operational burden. Products that don$$t meet the necessary criteria remain in a developer$-$managed state.

Even when new products become important enough to the company to warrant being assigned an SRE, developers still must have self$-$managed their service in production for at least six months before it becomes eligible to have an SRE assigned to the team.

To help ensure that these self$-$managed product teams can still benefit from the collective experience of the SRE organization, Google created two sets of safety checks for two critical stages of releasing new services called the Launch Readiness Review and the Hand$-$Off Readiness Review $($LRR and HRR$,$ respectively$).$