Comparison
On-call rotationvsToil
On-call rotation
one person is responsible for answering at 3am this week, and next week it is you.
The schedule that says who responds to production alerts outside working hours. Beyond its obvious purpose it is the main feedback loop between operations and design, and its health is measurable: pages per shift, pages that were actionable, sleep lost. A rotation smaller than about six people is a burnout schedule, and one where the same person is always called is an ownership problem wearing a rota.
Full entry →Toil
you did the same twenty-minute manual runbook every Tuesday for a year.
Manual, repetitive, automatable operational work that scales with the size of the system and produces no lasting value. It is worth naming because it hides: each instance is small and doing it feels like being helpful. The SRE convention of capping it — measuring what fraction of a team's time it consumes and treating a breach as a signal to invest — turns a slow drain into a visible, arguable number.
Full entry →