Show Notes
Season 3 of Making of the SRE Omelette is here - and it’s all about resilience.
Resilience isn’t just about surviving outages. It’s about building systems and cultures that adapt, learn, and thrive under pressure.
In our kickoff episode, we sit down with Dr. Jennifer Petoff, co-editor of Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems and leader of Google’s Global SRE Education. Jennifer shares why resilience starts with people, not just technology—and how psychological safety and confidence are the secret ingredients for reliability at scale.
You’ll learn:
* How to scale learning like a production system
* Why postmortem culture drives improvement
* How to apply SRE principles beyond infrastructure
If you’ve ever wondered how to make reliability a business advantage, this episode is for you.
Check out How to SRE Anything here: https://www.reliablepgm.com/how-to-sre-anything/
Topics:
* Origins of SRE and Education at Google
How Google scaled SRE education globally.
Why education is treated like a production system (repeatable, reliable, measurable).
* Psychological Safety and Learning
Why psychological safety is critical for resilience.
Creating environments where teams can share mistakes without fear of blame.
How this accelerates learning and reliability.
* Hands-On Experience as a Learning Model
Importance of experiential learning (e.g., game days, simulations).
Why theory alone isn’t enough for building confidence under pressure.
* Scaling Knowledge Across Large Organizations
Strategies Google uses to scale SRE principles globally.
Balancing standardization with flexibility for local teams.
* Resilience Beyond Reliability
How resilience differs from reliability.
Building adaptive systems and teams that thrive through adversity.
* Culture as a Foundation
Why culture is the “secret ingredient” for successful SRE adoption.
Encouraging curiosity and collaboration across roles.
* Future of SRE Education
Trends in learning for distributed teams.
How continuous education supports evolving reliability practices.
More from Making of the SRE Omelette
In this episode with return guest David Leigh, we explore one of the most important pillars of Season 3: how learning transforms systems—and more specifically, how resilience is built not through tools or processes alone, but through the interplay of diverse perspectives, psychological safety, and evolving mental models.
In this unique episode, we sit down with Dr. Jane Goodyer, Dean of the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University and a global leader in reimagining engineering education. From her inspiring personal journey to pioneering Canada’s first fully work-integrated digital technologies degree, Jane shares how academia and industry can collaborate to prepare graduates for the ever-changing world of work.
The conclusion of the two part crossover podcast series explores the intersection of AI with sustainable IT operations featuring Jerry Cuomo from The Art of AI and Kevin Yu from Making of the SRE Omelette. The discussion delves into practical measures for more efficient energy use in AI systems, emphasizing the need for data and the analysis of past behavior to inform energy-efficient decision-making. Jerry and Kevin highlight the importance of balancing AI and human inputs to achieve meaningful tasks and improve overall quality of products. Discuss challenges such as right-sizing compute and recognize the pivotal role of data in addressing these issues, advocating for a data-driven approach to answer critical questions and provide necessary context for decision-making.
Mike Hollinger, Master Inventor, CTO for Applied AI & Distinguished Engineer for Maximo Application Suite talks about how we can leverage operational insights from assets, facilities and infrastructure to drive clean energy transition and decarbonization. Mike shares stories from customers that showcases successes as well as challenges they faced. Mike have a call to action to inspire Site Reliability Engineers to embrace the data and capabilities we have at our fingertips today to turn data into action to achieve the sustainable future.
Have you struggled to convince others of your idea? Be it to tackle a reliability problem or a sustainability challenge. In this episode, I have a conversation with Danny Fontaine - host of the Podcast Pitch Master on how to pitch SRE and Sustainability ideas.