Deploying SRE Training Best Practices to Production: How We SRE'ed Our SRE Education Program

Structured education is important for ramping up new SREs to build confidence and fight imposter syndrome. In this talk, we take a look behind the scenes of the SRE EDU Orientation curriculum at Google from a technical standpoint and organizational point of view while highlighting best practices that can be applied at organizations of all sizes. We’ll show how we applied SRE best practices to the program itself to minimize toil for the organizers (keyword: automation!) and keep the training software reliable and up to date.

By implementing judicious monitoring, we learned that hands-on exercises are a more successful way to ramp people up than one-way lectures. We built a rigged production system where an instructor can trigger outages that the students need to triage, mitigate and resolve. As the system is internal only, students cannot cause externally visible harm, creating a safe learning environment that allows for experimentation.