Being Oncall

I’m primary oncall for my AWS Service this week, so I might not have enough time to write every day, but as promised here’s a quick thing, what’s oncall like? I’m not going to give you stories today, but I can tell you what concepts go through my head during oncall week.

Monitoring Distributed Systems.

Logs, metrics, alarms, how to read them, troubleshoot issues, respond to alarms.

Ticket Response

How to address customer tickets, making sure they have a good experience but have a bias toward self-service, otherwise the system doesn’t scale.

Automate Manual Work

No toil, if a machine can do it, make it do it. Automate carefully, deliberately and always monitor and have a way to roll back in case there are problems.

Improve, Optimize, Make it Better

Improve the customer experience, Improve the System, Improve the process. Always look for inefficiencies to optimize away.

Look Ahead

Think long term, think big. Be proactive.

I know that these are just abstract concepts without any examples, but, it is what it is.

PS: I highly recommend checking out the Google SRE Books. They are free and provide helpful, actionable guidance.