SRE Doesn’t Scale
It sounds like the lesson here is that tacking on SRE to an out-of-control development process, churning out new services by the boatload, doesn't scale.This is caused by the typical attitude software companies have towards development. The most common model for software development is simple... rush to push out new features to the market, and pay the costs later--and then everyone is balking at the costs.The solution is kind of brilliant, IMO. You don't have to pay technical debt on projects if you shut them down and delete the code from your repository. Migrate to industry-standard solutions. Use off-the-shelf programs & libraries. Delete all your custom stuff. Replace good solutions with "good enough" solutions.The SREs can help you with that, but they can't help with out-of-control development. As your code base gets larger, the cost of supporting that code base gets larger too. The difficulty of scaling your SRE to match development reflects your out-of-control development process, not a problem with SRE. Keep the costs under control by keeping your code base under control.