Toil Reduction
Toil reduction is the practice of finding recurring operational work that people perform by hand and changing the system so that work no longer repeats. It protects engineering time for reliability improvements, service design, and planned change.
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Intro
Toil Reduction
Toil reduction changes the relationship between a team and its operational work. The aim is not to eliminate all operations. The aim is to stop spending skilled attention on recurring tasks that a system, a workflow, or a better service interface can perform consistently.
In Site Reliability Engineering, toil is work that is manual, repetitive, automatable, reactive, and has no enduring value. A task can be unpleasant without being toil. Investigating a new failure or designing a migration can require judgment and produce a durable improvement. Repeating the same account change from tickets each week does neither.
You reduce toil by making it visible, choosing a bounded problem, and changing the system that creates the demand. Automation is one option. A self-service interface, a safer default, retiring a legacy path, or changing an ownership boundary can remove the task more effectively than a script.
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Sources
- https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/
Supports
- Toil as manual, repetitive, automatable, reactive work with no enduring value
- Engineering investment and automation as ways to reduce recurring operational work
- https://sre.google/workbook/eliminating-toil/
Supports
- Measuring and placing limits on operational work
- Strategies including automation, self-service, rejecting toil, and decommissioning legacy systems
- https://sre.google/sre-book/automation-at-google/
Supports
- Automation as an engineering practice with levels and trade-offs
- https://sre.google/sre-book/dealing-with-interrupts/
Supports
- Tickets, pages, and ongoing operational responsibilities as forms of operational load
- https://sre.google/workbook/overload/
Supports
- Team overload and the consequences of high toil proportion
- https://github.com/dastergon/awesome-sre
Supports
- Discovery of Rundeck, Ansible, and platform engineering resources
- https://www.rundeck.com/open-source
Supports
- Official Rundeck Community destination for runbook automation
- https://www.ansible.com/
Supports
- Official Ansible destination for automation
- https://backstage.io/
Supports
- Official Backstage destination for platform self-service