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.
Episodes
Ship it! with Vasanth Krishnamoorthy
In this episode of the Prodcast, hosts Steve McGhee and Matt Siegler are joined by Vasa Krishnamoorthy, Head of Web Foundations at Pinterest. They discuss what it takes to ship software at scale, how to manage technical migrations, and how AI is transforming the developer workflow. Vasa observes that AI makes generating code faster and cheaper, and it creates new bottlenecks in code review and CI
Ship it! with William Holroyd and Regulated Clouds
In Season 7, Episode 3 of The Prodcast, hosts Jordan Greenberg and Steve McGhee sit down with William Holroyd, an Site Reliability Engineer specializing in regulated cloud, for an insightful and engaging discussion on navigating complex compliance landscapes. Together, they break down what it really means to run software in regulated environments—covering key concepts like data residency, access c
Ship it! with Avery Pennarun and Tailscale
Avery Pennarun, CEO and co-founder of Tailscale, joins the Prodcast to discuss reliability, enterprise scaling, and engineering philosophy. This episode discusses how taking responsibility for user networking and edge cases builds long-term product reliability. Avery also talks about how AI tools can improve psychological safety, reduce noise, and serve as an information spine for teams
Ship it! with Daniel Hobe
Daniel Hobe, SRE leader for Search, Geo, and DeepMind at Google, joins hosts Steve McGhee and Matt Siegler to discuss the unique engineering and cultural challenges of maintaining reliability for products with billions of users. This episode explores the evolution of release processes—from traditional canary gating and A/B testing to the complexities of monitoring non-deterministic AI models and g
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.
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.
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.
John Allspaw at SREcon Part 1
John Allspaw discusses reliability with Prodcast host Steve McGhee at SREcon Americas 2026
Ricard Bejarano: The SRE At Home
We speak with Ricard Bejarano about being an SRE at home, discussing Home Lab systems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 t
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.
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 syst
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 ens
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" an
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 de
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!
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 c
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-
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 ensuri
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
The One with STPA, Jeffrey Snover, and Theo Klein
This episode discusses Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), a method for analyzing complex systems. Theo Klein, a Google SRE, and Jeffrey Snover, a Distinguished Engineer at Google, explain that STPA focuses on identifying how system accidents and losses occur due to a loss of control, rather than component failures. STPA helps identify design flaws early, even before code is written! The di
The One with Startups and Adam Fletcher
In this episode, hosts Steve McGhee and Matt Siegler are joined by guest, Adam Fletcher, CEO and Co-Founder of MarketStreet. They discuss the current state of web development with LLMs, managing technical debt in startups, the evolution of infrastructure and reliability engineering, the role of community in technology, and the future of software engineering with AI.
The One with SLOs and Sal Furino
In this episode, Sal Furino, Customer Reliability Engineer at Bloomberg, discusses all things Service Level Objectives (SLOs) with hosts Steve McGhee and Matt Siegler. Together, they dig into what successful SLOs look like, how it relates to users, and how SLOs provide an effective framework for joint decisions about system reliability across product, engineering, and leadership teams.
The One With the Future of SRE and Matt Zelesko
Matt Zelesko, the head of Site Reliability Engineering at Google, discusses the evolution of SRE, highlighting the shift from traditional operations to a model that balances velocity and reliability to better serve the rapid advancements in AI and ML. He emphasizes that SRE's core mission is to enable partners to move quickly while meeting reliability goals, and that the sheer scale of Google's in
The One with AI and Todd Underwood
In this Google Prodcast episode, Todd Underwood, a reliability expert from Anthropic with experience at Google and OpenAI, discusses the current state and future of AI in SRE. Todd and the hosts focus on the current state and future of AI and ML in production, particularly for SREs. Topics discussed include the challenges of AI-Ops, limitations of current anomaly detection, the potential for AI in
The One With Data Centers and Peter Pellerzi
This episode features guest, Peter Pellerzi (Distinguished Engineer, Google). Peter and the hosts, Matt Siegler and Steve McGhee, focus on the physical infrastructure side of SRE, discussing topics such as the scale of Google's data centers, handling incidents like power outages, testing and preparedness strategies, the use of AI for optimizing cooling plants, and more. Peter also emphasizes the i
The One With Security and Jessica Theodat
Jessica Theodat (Senior SRE & Security Tech Lead, Google) joins hosts Jordan Greenberg and Steve McGhee to discuss the intersection of security and site reliability engineering at Google. Jessica touches on risk management, the unique nature of security incident responses, and the shared goals between security and SRE. The crew also delves into the balance between security and SRE, acknowledging t
We're back with Season 4!
In this "bumpisode", hosts and producers of Prodcast (including our new co-host, Matt Siegler!) reflect on the previous season and introduce the new season's focus on upcoming trends in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and AI, and the friends we make along the way. They also introduce new elements we are bringing in with Season 4, such as a video format and a feedback form.
Special Episode: You Missed a Page from Telebot
This episode features Javi Beltran, a Google engineering lead who created the "Telebot" theme song. With our beloved hosts, Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg, Beltran discusses the origins of the song, created in 2012 for Google's paging system. The song was meant to add a touch of levity to what could be a stressful situation for engineers on-call. Beltran also unveils a new, more modern remix of
Imperative vs. Declarative Change Workflows with Dominic Hutton & Niccolo' Cascarano
In this episode of the Prodcast, guests Dominic Hutton (Staff SRE, HashiCorp) and Niccolo' Cascarano (Senior Staff SRE at Google) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to dive into configurations. They discuss the differences between imperative and declarative configuration, explore the benefits and challenges of each approach, and the need for careful consideration when choosing between th
Human Factors in Complex Systems with Casey Rosenthal and John Allspaw
This episode features Casey Rosenthal (Founder, Cirrusly.ai) and John Allspaw (Founder and Principal, Adaptive Capacity Labs), joining our hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg. Together they discuss how resilience appears in Software Engineering and SRE and explore the importance of understanding the human factors involved in adapting to system failures—highlighting the need for a more qualitat
Embracing Complexity with Christina Schulman & Dr. Laura Maguire
In this episode of the Prodcast, we are joined by guests Christina Schulman (Staff SRE, Google) and Dr. Laura Maguire (Principal Engineer, Trace Cognitive Engineering). They emphasize the human element of SRE and the importance of fostering a culture of collaboration, learning, and resilience in managing complex systems. They touch upon topics such as the need for diverse perspectives and collabor
Maglev: load balancing at Google with Cody Smith and Trisha Weir
In this episode, Cody Smith (CTO and Co-founder, Camus Energy) & Trisha Weir (SRE Department Lead, Google) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg, to discuss their experience developing Maglev, a highly available and distributed network load balancer (NLB) that is an integral part of the cloud architecture that manages traffic that comes in to a datacenter. Starting with Maglev's humble begi
Profiling data with Pat Somaru and Narayan Desai
In this episode, guests Narayan Desai (Principal SRE, Google) and Pat Somaru (Senior Production Engineer, Meta) join hosts Steve McGhee and Florian Rathgeber to discuss the challenges of observability and working with profiling data. The discussion covers intriguing topics like noise reduction, workload modeling, and the need for better tools and techniques to handle high-cardinality data.
Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8) with Wilmer van der Gaast and Andy Sykes
This episode features Google engineers Wilmer van der Gaast (Production on-tall) and Andy Sykes (Senior Staff Systems Engineer, SRE), joining hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg, to discuss the development and maintenance of Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8). They highlight the initial motivations for creating the service, technical challenges like cache poisoning and load balancing, as well as the
SRE in the Retail and Gaming Worlds with Jordan Chernev & Scott Bowers
Guests Jordan Chernev (Senior Technology Executive) and Scott Bowers (SRE, Gearbox Software) who hail from the retail and gaming industries, respectively, join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to discuss the unique challenges of Site Reliability Engineering in their industries. They share the importance of aligning SLOs with user experience, strategies for handling spikes in traffic, commu
Incident Response with Sarah Butt and Vrai Stacey
Sarah Butt (Principal Engineer, Centralized Incident Response, Salesforce) and Vrai Stacey (Staff Software Engineer, Google) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to dive into incident response—particularly tooling and software for reliability incidents. Tune in for an in-depth discussion on topics such as the importance of communication and collaboration during incidents, and the role of t
Building Reliable Systems with Silvia Botros and Niall Murphy
Silvia Botros (SRE Architect, Twilio | Author of "High Performance MySQL, 4th edition") and Niall Murphy (Co-founder & CEO, Stanza) join hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg, to discuss cultural shifts in database engineering, rate limiting, load shedding, holistic approaches to reliability, proactive measures to build customer trust, and much more!
Creating Systems that are Safe with Liz Fong-Jones
Liz Fong-Jones (former Google SRE and current Field CTO at honeycomb.io) joins hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg for a lively discussion centered around observability, its evolution from monitoring, and its role in modern software development. Tune in for more on the importance of observability as a spectrum, the evolving role of SREs, and advice to aspiring software engineers.
Production Problems Are For All! with Ben Treynor Sloss
Ben Treynor Sloss (VP of Engineering, Google) joins hosts Steve McGhee and Dr. Jennifer Petoff (Director of Technical Infrastructure Education, Google) to share the evolution of SRE and its impact on software development, how AI and ML significantly impacts SRE practices, and the future of SRE. Ben coined the term "Site Reliability Engineering" for his team of (now) 4,000 software engineers, engag
There Remains a Huge Amount of Work to Do, with Healfdene Goguen
In this episode, Healfdene Goguen (Principal Engineer, Google) joins hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to discuss the vast amount of work to be done by SREs, and the fascinating challenges to tackle with clear real-world implications. It's a truly exciting time to be an SRE at Google!
SRE, a Basis of Influence, with Amy Tobey & Vladyslav Ukis
In this season of Google Prodcast, current and former SREs, both within and outside of Google, chat with hosts Steve McGhee and Jordan Greenberg to discuss software systems designed and built by SREs. For "episode zero", guests Amy Tobey (Live Services SRE, Netflix) and Dr. Vladyslav Ukis (Head of R&D, Siemens Healthineers, Author of "Establishing SRE Foundations") will set the stage for the seas
Life of An SRE: Life after Google SRE, with Carla Geisser, Cody Smith, and Laura Nolan
Former Google SREs, or "Xooglers", talk with hosts MP and Steve McGhee about site reliability engineering outside of Google. What's the difference in scale? What skills are generally valuable? And why can't you build "SRE in a box" that jump-starts pretty much any organization? Join Carla Geisser, Cody Smith, and Laura Nolan in their lively conversation about what SRE skills and knowledge they hav
Life of An SRE with Sabrina Farmer
Sabrina Farmer, VP of Engineering at Google, talks about her career journey through Site Reliability Engineering. What does management mean? What's involved in being an effective manager? and what's a feasibility study? Hear some great advice on how to get what you expect out of a role, wherever on the ladder it is.
Life of An SRE with Dave Reisner
Dave Reisner talks about his path to Staff SRE, from ArchLinux contributor through DevOps to software engineer. This episode emphasizes the value of strong mentoring and manager relationships, and the challenges of work-life balance.
Life of an SRE with Stephen Benjamin
Explore the role and responsibilities of an SRE manager with Stephen Benjamin.
Life of An SRE with Jessica Theodat
Explore the role and responsibilities of a Senior SRE with Jessica Theodat, as she discusses life-work balance, the value of mentoring, and being a Black woman in SRE.
Life of An SRE with Shannon Brady and Theo Klein
Explore the career path of SREs Shannon Brady and Theo Klein as they discusses their paths to Site Reliability Engineering and finding their areas of expertise.
Life of An SRE with Mariuxi Vasconez and Julian Alarcon
In this episode, Mariuxi and Julian discuss their paths to SRE: what drew them initially to SRE, and what motivates them to continue developing skills
Life of An SRE Episode 1: Tom Cranitch and Megan Yin
How does one become an SRE? And what's the career like? In this episode, Tom and Megan discuss their path to SRE.
Creating the SRE Prodcast with John Reese (JTR)
Host MP English and former Google SRE John Reese (JTR) chat about the creation of the Prodcast. Visit https://sre.google/prodcast for transcripts and links to further reading. View transcript
Postmortems with Ayelet Sachto
Ayelet Sachto offers advice on creating an actionable, transparent, and blameless postmortem culture. Visit https://sre.google/prodcast for transcripts and links to further reading. View transcript
Incident Management with Adrienne Walcer
Adrienne Walcer discusses how to approach and organize incident management efforts throughout the production lifecycle. Visit https://sre.google/prodcast for transcripts and links to further reading. View transcript
On-Call Rotations with Andrew Widdowson (APW)
Andrew Widdowson (APW) shares strategies for successful on-call rotations. Visit https://sre.google/prodcast for transcripts and links to further reading. View transcript
Automation with Pierre Palatin
Pierre Palatin dives into different automation strategies, how to build confidence in your system, and why designing the UI may be your biggest challenge. Visit https://sre.google/prodcast for transcripts and links to further reading. View transcript
Client-Transparent Migrations with Pavan Adharapurapu
Pavan Adharapurapu details how to approach large-scale migrations while optimizing for user experience. Visit https://sre.google/prodcast for transcripts and links to further reading. View transcript
Rethinking SLOs with Narayan Desai
Narayan Desai explains why SLOs can be problematic and proposes alternative methods for monitoring complex, large-scale systems. Visit https://sre.google/prodcast for transcripts and links to further reading. View transcript
Alerting with Amelia Harrison
Amelia Harrison advises on when and how to alert, ideal coverage, and tuning. Visit https://sre.google/prodcast for transcripts and links to further reading. View transcript
Customer-Centric Monitoring with Silvia Esparrachiari
Silvia Esparrachiari talks about the challenges of monitoring and the importance of understanding your users. Visit https://sre.google/prodcast for transcripts and links to further reading. View transcript
SRE Philosophy with Jennifer Mace (Macey)
What is SRE, anyway? Jennifer Mace (Macey) gives us her definition of "site reliability engineer," discusses how to manage risk, and shares key questions to ask developers. Visit https://sre.google/prodcast for transcripts and links to further reading. View transcript
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