[rwiggins]

It has indeed been a strange time for Google SRE recently. However, they're definitely not planning on shutting down SRE - at least, if you can trust what Google leadership's actual explanation of what that meant.

Supposedly, the ratio of SRE to product eng had been growing slowly over the years. The KR to "readjust" that ratio was to bring it back in line with historical norms, i.e., to ensure that SRE continued to scale sub-linearly with SWE/systems. This had (primarily) two facets.

First, it gave SRE teams an effectively-blank check to reevaluate their existing dev engagements and jettison the ones that weren't working well.

Second, it pushed to eliminate old tools/systems/platforms and converge onto the more modern stuff, like Annealing [1]. Fewer crufty platforms means fewer teams needed to run them, and improvements in those platforms have broad impact.

Anecdotally, my own sub-org (within SRE) is growing at the moment. Not by a huge amount, but growing nonetheless.

[1]: https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/prodspec-and...