Site Reliability Engineering promised to solve operational pain through engineering discipline. For most organizations, it didn’t deliver. The SRE team became another operations team with a different name. Toil reduction became a talking point instead of a practice. The feedback loop between incidents and platform improvements never closed.
This series diagnoses why SRE failed outside its native environment and proposes a reframe: resiliency as a platform design principle rather than a team function.
The Core Problem
Google had preconditions most organizations don’t: engineering-led culture, massive scale that justified the investment, authority granted to SRE teams to enforce standards. When organizations adopted SRE without those preconditions, they got the terminology without the transformation.
The model wasn’t wrong. It was context-dependent. And nobody said that out loud.
What You’ll Learn
Part 1: The Promise That Couldn’t Travel
Why SRE worked at Google and failed elsewhere. The structural dependencies hidden in the model. How “we do SRE” became a badge without the substance.
Part 2: The Promise That Can
Resiliency reframed as platform architecture. Operations responds to incidents. Platform prevents categories of incidents. The boundary is clear: operations handles what happened, platform ensures it doesn’t happen again.
Part 3: Promises Made, Promises Kept
Making it operational. Requiring platform action items from incident reviews. Reserving platform capacity for hardening work. Enforcing resiliency standards through the platform. The Monday checklist that starts the flywheel.
Why This Matters
The feedback loop between operations and platform teams is what turns incidents into improvements. Without that loop, you’re just firefighting forever. With it, every incident makes the next one less likely.
Platform Resiliency doesn’t require organizational restructure. It clarifies boundaries rather than redrawing org charts. It creates habits rather than demanding transformation.
Who This Is For
Operations teams tired of firefighting the same categories of problems. Platform architects looking for a model that fits their actual authority. Leaders who adopted SRE and wondered why it didn’t transform anything. Anyone holding an “SRE” title and feeling disconnected from the original philosophy.
Be water, my friend. The framework adapts to your container. Your organization is the cup, the bottle, the teapot. Platform Resiliency takes the shape you need it to take.
