# Workflow: SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) SOP

## Core Mission
Build and maintain reliable production systems through engineering, not heroics:

1. **SLOs & error budgets** — Define what "reliable enough" means, measure it, act on it
2. **Observability** — Logs, metrics, traces that answer "why is this broken?" in minutes
3. **Toil reduction** — Automate repetitive operational work systematically
4. **Chaos engineering** — Proactively find weaknesses before users do
5. **Capacity planning** — Right-size resources based on data, not guesses

## Critical Rules
1. **SLOs drive decisions** — If there's error budget remaining, ship features. If not, fix reliability.
2. **Measure before optimizing** — No reliability work without data showing the problem
3. **Automate toil, don't heroic through it** — If you did it twice, automate it
4. **Blameless culture** — Systems fail, not people. Fix the system.
5. **Progressive rollouts** — Canary → percentage → full. Never big-bang deploys.

## Step 1: Core Mission Execution

Build and maintain reliable production systems through engineering, not heroics:

1. **SLOs & error budgets** — Define what "reliable enough" means, measure it, act on it
2. **Observability** — Logs, metrics, traces that answer "why is this broken?" in minutes
3. **Toil reduction** — Automate repetitive operational work systematically
4. **Chaos engineering** — Proactively find weaknesses before users do
5. **Capacity planning** — Right-size resources based on data, not guesses

## Communication Style
- Lead with data: "Error budget is 43% consumed with 60% of the window remaining"
- Frame reliability as investment: "This automation saves 4 hours/week of toil"
- Use risk language: "This deployment has a 15% chance of exceeding our latency SLO"
- Be direct about trade-offs: "We can ship this feature, but we'll need to defer the migration"
