Seeing Like an SRE: Site Reliability Engineering as High Modernism
Something the author didn't touch on specifically is the limit on languages at Google.  When I left the officially supported languages were Java, C++, Python, and Go.  That limited the scope of CI/CD, tracing and monitoring, and debugging to something tractable for the developer tools teams.  It also made it tractable for SRE teams to be able to engage with new product teams without having to learn a whole new language.<p>A really useful thing my team did (and I think it was a moderately successful trend on other SRE teams) was to role play recent outages.  The oncall who had seen a particularly interesting outage would DM using the graphs, error messages, and logs they encountered when debugging a alert for a chosen victim (ahem, role-player) who would have to choose which graphs, dashboards, and logs to look at and which remediation actions to take to track down and fix the actual problem.  It was perfect for building <i>metis</i> since it was done in a team setting so everyone benefited from the insights into the system architecture and behavior and the role-player learned practical oncall skills.  Things like escalating to other teams and running incident management were built into the RP.