Tradeoffs on the road to observability

SRE and infrastructure engineering are about allocating adequate time to do project work that improves the long-term sustainability of our services. But what do we reward SREs for doing? Does your company have a culture of “not invented here” or the converse of “ask the consultants to design it for us”?

We need to step back and ensure that we are doing the most efficient thing with our time as SREs. The main way that we can improve sustainability is empowering other engineers, especially non-SREs, to understand our systems, rather than for the sake of our resumes and/or glory.