This recap includes the following episodes and guests. 
Guest title reflects the guest's position at the time of the episode.

Recipes:

• People: The Heartbeat and Mindset of SRE

• Process: From Toil to Teamwide Transformation

• Platform: The Foundation for Scalable, Sustainable Reliability

The Three-Legged Stool of SRE

🍳 Chapter Theme: Building Reliability with People, Process & Platform

What does it really takes to build reliable systems?  It requires not just a technical perspective, but from a human and organizational one. as well.  Episode 15 brought us the voices of Ashley,  Abhay, and Andrew - three practitioners who represent the “A-Team” of SRE.  In Episode 16, Kyle Brown zoomed out to show us how reliability engineering scales across an enterprise.  Together, they painted a full picture of what the three-legged stool of SRE looks like in practice.

👥 People: The Heartbeat and Mindset of SRE

🎯 Goal: Foster a culture of curiosity, collaboration, and shared responsibility for reliability.

The human side of SRE is where everything begins—and where it scales.  The journey into SRE is also rarely linear—and that’s what makes it so powerful. 

Kyle Brown brought a leadership lens to the conversation, emphasizing that technical vitality is not just about individual growth - it’s about building a culture that supports it. “You can be the best engineer, but if you can’t communicate what you’re doing, it doesn’t make any difference.”  He encouraged engineers to start small—presenting to their squad, writing blogs, sharing learnings—and grow their influence over time. His advice: “Never publish something once. Reuse your ideas, build on them, and share them in different formats.”

Ashley echoed this with a powerful story about learning to ask for help. Early in her career, she struggled with a complex task and hesitated to speak up. Her manager noticed and encouraged her to reach out. That moment changed her approach: “Asking for help is actually a skill, if you know how to leverage it properly.”She now sees collaboration as a core part of her role: “Everyone has different experiences and everyone can teach you new lessons every day.”

Together, these voices show that technical vitality isn’t just about staying current—it’s about staying connected, being open to learning, and building a culture where reliability is everyone’s responsibility.

🔄 Process: From Toil to Teamwide Transformation

🎯 Goal: Build scalable workflows and habits that embed reliability into everyday work.

The path to reliable systems is paved with repeatable, thoughtful processes—and the guests made it clear that this transformation doesn’t happen by accident. It starts with recognizing the friction points and turning them into opportunities for improvement.

Andrew shared a powerful example of this shift. When a customer escalation revealed a blind spot in monitoring, his team didn’t just patch the issue—they built a new alerting and automation workflow to prevent it from happening again: “We weren’t alerting on the data transaction log… so we created new monitoring and automation to take action before it became a problem.” This kind of learning loop—incident to insight to system improvement—is at the heart of SRE practice.

Abhay’s approach to anomaly detection also reflects this mindset. He described how his models identified a brewing issue weeks before it would have triggered an SLA breach: “We told them things are going in the wrong direction… and we were able to avoid a big problem without the customer care being involved.” But he also acknowledged the effort behind the scenes: “Every customer has different data sources… I always end up changing or modifying those functions.” His takeaway? Standardizing data pipelines is just as important as building the models that use them.

Ashley highlighted how even tasks like documentation can drive process improvement. Though she admitted, “I find it hard to put my thoughts onto paper,” she also recognized the value: “It helps me see the solution from a client’s point of view… and improve the automation process to make it more efficient.” Her team’s work on automating client communications and remediation tasks is a great example of how thoughtful process design can reduce support load and improve user experience.

🧱 Platform: The Foundation for Scalable, Sustainable Reliability

🎯 Goal: Build intentional, automated platforms that support both system and service-level reliability.

A resilient platform is more than infrastructure—it’s the connective tissue that enables observability, automation, and proactive operations at scale. For SREs, the platform must not only be reliable, but also operable, adaptable, and designed with their workflows in mind.

Most importantly, Kyle emphasized that automation must be built into the platform from the start—not bolted on later: “Everything is automated. And I mean everything.”  His team uses Ansible and CI/CD pipelines to manage infrastructure, security, and compliance as code, making it easier for SREs to operate and evolve the platform without manual intervention.

Together, these perspectives show that building a strong platform isn’t just about uptime—it’s about creating a foundation that enables SREs to work smarter, scale faster, and operate more sustainably.

The message is clear: platform thinking isn’t just about infrastructure—it’s about building the foundation for everything else to stand on.

💬 Let’s Talk: Questions to Stir the Pot

1. 🧠 How do you balance automation with the need for human insight in reliability engineering?

2. 🎮 What’s one “non-functional” requirement you think should be rebranded as essential?

3. 🙋 How do you ensure your platform and service teams stay aligned as your architecture evolves?