Google SRE Prodcast

Salim Virji

SRE Prodcast brings Google's experience with Site Reliability Engineering together with special guests and exciting topics to discuss the present and future of reliable production engineering!

Play

Open in

20 episodes
Avg 24 min
English

Episodes 20

Newest Oldest Longest

All20 Unplayed20 In progress0 Played0

S6 · E4
July 8 · 15 min
Adam Kramer discusses Incident Response
Google's Tech Incident Response Team (IRT) manages the complex production environment during times of intensive change. In this episode, IRT member Adam Kramer talks about the importance of psychological safety to ensure that engineers can communicate effectively.
S6 · E8
June 16 · 7 min
Courtney Nash on Complex Systems
Courtney Nash of The VOID discusses the role of human expertise in managing complex systems, and how SREs continue to bring critical value even as technology and AI evolve.
S6 · E6
June 9 · 8 min
John Allspaw at SREcon Part 1
John Allspaw discusses reliability with Prodcast host Steve McGhee at SREcon Americas 2026
S6 · E7
June 9 · 9 min
John Allspaw at SREcon Part 2
John Allspaw joins Prodcast hosts Matt Siegler and Florian Rathgeber for a candid discussion of reliability topics at SREcon Americas 2026.
S6 · E5
June 2 · 7 min
Ricard Bejarano: The SRE At Home
We speak with Ricard Bejarano about being an SRE at home, discussing Home Lab systems.
S6 · E4
May 26 · 23 min
Matt Zelesko and the Future of SRE
We sit down with Matt Zelesko, VP of SRE at Google, for a candid talk about how AI is changing SRE — and how it's not.
S6 · E3
May 21 · 10 min
Handling Burnout with Sam Anderson
Sam Anderson shares his experiences with burnout, and how to support yourself as a reliable system. Sam provides guidance on how to deal with burnout, and some suggestions on how to avoid burnout through understanding yourself and finding the help and support you need.
S6 · E2
May 15 · 43 min
The One with Crisis Engineering and Mikey Dickerson
Crisis Engineer Mikey Dickerson joins us to talk about what constitutes a crisis. Mikey draws on his broad experience across industry and the public sector, as well as on work with his team of systems fixers.
S6 · E1
May 12 · 9 min
This is Fine! With Colette Alexander and Clint Byrum
What's happening in the world of SRE and resilience engineering? Join us as we catch up with fellow podcast hosts Colette Alexander and Clint Byrum of the This Is Fine! podcast at SREcon in Seattle.
S5 · E8
February 26 · 31 min
The One With Damion Yates and Building AI systems
How do you introduce Site Reliability Engineering to an AI research lab, bringing concepts of scale to engineers who are at the leading edge of AI systems? In the latest episode of The Prodcast, hosts Steve McGhee and Florian Rathgeber chat with Damion Yates, who helped establish the reliability engineering culture at Google DeepMind. Damion shares his journey of bringing scalable infrastructure to DeepMind, supporting massive machine learning experiments. Discover the unique challenges of supporting AI research, such as managing highly expensive "lockstep" training models where a single machine failure halts the entire process. Damion also explains why he believes "luck is our enemy" in systems engineering, and why protecting a research scientist's time is the ultimate metric for success.
S5 · E7
February 11 · 25 min
The One With Carla Geisser and Crisis Engineering
Join us for a discussion with Carla Geisser of Layer Aleph, a company focused on "crisis engineering". Carla distinguishes a crisis from a standard incident by noting that a crisis is novel and lacks a playbook. She outlines five criteria for a true crisis: fundamental surprise, broken critical functions, high visibility, a rigid deadline (unlike internal tech deadlines), and perception breakdown. Crises often arise in organizations that struggle to admit computers control core decisions, leading to complex, glued-together systems. Carla emphasizes that SRE-adjacent skills are essential for connecting the dots and exposing the full system. The key takeaway for SREs is to recognize when a true crisis is happening, as leadership will only be willing to "break rules" and enable substantive change once three of these criteria are met.1
S5 · E6
February 5 · 36 min
The One with Parker Barnes, Felipe Tiengo Ferreira, and AI
This episode of the Prodcast tackles the challenges of maintaining AI safety and alignment in production. Guests Felipe Tiengo Ferreira and Parker Barnes join hosts Matt Siegler and Steve McGhee to discuss AI model safety, from examining content to emerging security risks. The discussion emphasizes the vital role of SREs in managing safety at scale, detailing multi-layered defenses, including system instructions, LLM classifiers, and Automated Red Teaming (ART). Felipe and Parker dive into the evolving world of AI safety, from core product policies to the groundbreaking Frontier Safety Framework. The guests explore the need for SRE principles like drift detection and context observability. Finally, they raise concerns about the velocity of AI development compressing long-term research, urging the industry to collaborate and share vocabulary to address rapidly emerging risks.
S5 · E5
January 28 · 24 min
The One With Shannon Brady and Operating Systems
In this episode of the Prodcast, guest Shannon Brady speaks with hosts Jordan Greenberg and Florian Rathgeber about managing Google's vast fleet of internal devices. Shannon explains how Google's Linux platform uses core SRE principles—specifically testing, canarying, and monitoring—for weekly stage rollouts of its Debian-based distribution. Configuration is efficiently managed using Puppet to ensure the right setup for a diverse user base. The conversation pivots to "the year of Linux everything," underscoring its widespread adoption. Discussing AI, Shannon identifies its greatest utility for SREs in rapidly analyzing signals and generating complex queries to resolve outages. This episode reinforces that practicing SRE fundamentals is paramount, demonstrating that you can be an SRE at heart, regardless of your official title.
S5 · E4
January 21 · 29 min
The One With Denia Del Cid and AI
Curious about the real impact of AI on Site Reliability Engineering? In this episode of The Prodcast, Google SRE Denia del Cid breaks down how her team is leveraging AI to transform production workflows. Denia details practical applications like early outage detection, incident similarity analysis, and toil reduction. She explains the critical importance of validating against "golden data sets" and keeping humans in the loop to build trust. Discover how SREs are evolving from skepticism to strategic adoption with Gemini. Tune in for a pragmatic, measured look at the future of reliability.
S5 · E3
January 14 · 24 min
The One With Heather Adkins and Security (and AI)
Join us on The Prodcast as we host Heather Adkins, leader of Google's Office of Cybersecurity Resilience, for a critical look at the future of digital defenses. We explore the intersection of SRE and security , unpacking the "Secure by Design" philosophy and the shared DNA of incident management. Heather candidly discusses the rise of "Agentic AI hackers" and polymorphic malware , revealing how defenders can use AI to stay ahead. From "castle" defense strategies to "nodal biology" theories, this episode is a must-listen for anyone navigating the new era of AI-driven threats.
S5 · E2
January 7 · 38 min
The One With SLOs
In this episode, we welcome Alex Hidalgo and Brian Singer of nobl9 to discuss Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Alex and Brian talk about how SLOs can establish a vernacular across industry verticals, leading to constructive conversations and a shared understanding of how to implement SRE practices. Join us for a lively discussion that ranges across SLO topics!
S5 · E1
Dec 16, 2025 · 33 min
The One With Steph Hippo and Observability
In this episode, Steph Hippo, Platform Engineering Director at Honeycomb, joins The Prodcast to discuss AI and SRE. Steph explains how observability helps us understand complex systems from their outputs, and provides a foundation for SRE to respond to system problems. This episode explains how AI and observability build a self-reinforcing loop. We also discuss how AI can detect and respond to certain classes of incidents, leading to self-healing systems and allowing SREs to focus on novel and interesting problems. She advises small businesses adopting AI to learn from others' mistakes (post-mortems) and to commit time and budget to experimentation.
S4 · E10
Jul 30, 2025 · 32 min
The One with Ben Good and Our Kubernetes Friends
In this special episode hosts Steve McGhee from the Google SRE Prodcast and Kaslin Fields from the Google Kubernetes Podcast, welcome Google Cloud Solutions Architect Ben Good to discuss platform engineering. Listeners can look forward to hearing about the role of Kubernetes as a tool for building platforms, how to create "golden paths" for developers, and the importance of observability and self-service in platform design. The conversation also touches on industry trends, the bespoke nature of platforms, and how DORA metrics can be applied to platform engineering practices.
S4 · E9
Jul 23, 2025 · 42 min
The One With AI Agents, Ramón Llamas, and Swapnil Haria
Google Staff SRE Ramón Llamas and Google Software Engineer Swapnil Haria join our hosts to explore how AI agents are revolutionizing production management, from summarizing alerts and finding hidden errors to proactively preventing outages. Learn about the challenges of evaluating non-deterministic systems and the fascinating interplay between human expertise and emerging AI capabilities in ensuring robust and reliable infrastructure.
S4 · E8
Jul 16, 2025 · 27 min
The One with Technical Program Managers and Karanveer Anand
This episode features Google Technical Program Manager (TPM) Karanveer Anand, who joins our hosts to discuss the unique role of TPMs in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). The conversation highlights how SRE TPMs bridge the gap between technical details and business impact, managing complex projects with inter-team dependencies and ensuring system reliability, particularly in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Showing 1–20 of 20 episodes