Toil Reduction: Strategies and Automation Priorities
Introduction Toil is manual, repetitive, automatable work that scales linearly with service growth. It’s the operational burden that keeps engineers from doing valuable engineering work. Reducing toil is essential for scaling both systems and teams effectively.
What is Toil? Google’s SRE Definition Toil has the following characteristics:
Manual - Requires human action Repetitive - Done over and over Automatable - Could be automated Tactical - Reactive, interrupt-driven No enduring value - Doesn’t improve the system Scales linearly - Grows with service growth Toil vs Engineering Work Toil (eliminate this):
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