SREcon25 Americas

Cory Watson


There’s no other part of SRE life that evokes such a strong reaction as being on-call. From the fear and anticipation of your first shift to the white-knuckle drama of a total system outage and the joy and satisfaction of debugging a particularly thorny issue - holding the pager is as much a human experience as a technical one. Let's talk about it!

We've done some surveys, pored over the literature, marinated in our experiences and have some findings. What models are in use? How do we feel about this work? What impact does it have? Can we do better? Will I get a pony? Ok, maybe not the last one.

I'll present some provocative findings that question the status quo around on-call and suggest some experiments you can take back and and test out. Maybe there will be a pony?


https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon25americas/presentation/watson