Does it seem like your SRE team is starting to look way too much like the familiar Operations team that you have always known? It’s easy to fall back on the well known patterns of production support. While it is critical to demonstrate strong Operations expertise, it is equally critical that your SRE team adopt a new mindset.

You may think that your first steps in building a healthy SRE team is to adopt all the acronyms: SLI, SLO, SLAs. It's enticing to immediately implement Error Budgets with consequences. But you first have to build a culture of trust and measurable performance.

We strive to drive our operational burden to zero. We look to automate last year’s work to make room for new challenges. We make the time to eliminate TOIL in our daily tasks.

In this talk, we will take a close look at how process and automation can be the driving force behind a truly empowered SRE team.