Pedantically, Google didn't have SREs as the beginning. I asked a very early SRE, Lucas, (https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/technology/postcards-from... and https://hackernoon.com/this-is-going-to-be-huge-google-found...), and he said that in the early days, outages would be really distracting to "the devs like Jeff and Sanjay" and he and a few others ended up forming SRE to handle site reliability more formally during the early days of growth, when Google got a reputation for being fast and scalable and nearly always up.
Lucas helped make one of my favorite Google Historical Artefacts, a crayon chart of search volume. They had to continuously rescale the graph in powers of ten due to exponential growth.
I miss pre-IPO Google and the Internet of that time.
Lucas helped make one of my favorite Google Historical Artefacts, a crayon chart of search volume. They had to continuously rescale the graph in powers of ten due to exponential growth.
I miss pre-IPO Google and the Internet of that time.