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Google’s site reliability senseis offer to train you in their mystical ways

Only for Google cloud customers, and The Chocolate Factory will need 'deep familiarity with your workloads’

Google Cloud has turned the company’s famed site reliability engineering methodology into a consulting service.

Offered only to customers of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), the new “Mission Critical Services (MCS) for GCP” is “built on the same methodologies we use in support of our own Google Cloud infrastructure, including a set of core concepts and methods that our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams have developed over the past two decades.”

While the morality of the extensive data-harvesting, ad-slinging, and video-spewing machines those teams built continues to be debated, their reliability is seldom challenged. Google clearly has wisdom to impart (and indeed literally wrote the book on SRE).

The search and ads giant seems to aspire to a mentoring role, rather than driving your systems.

“Unlike many premium services in the market that offload the entire burden of mission-critical support to the cloud vendor, MCS is a consultative offering in which we partner with you on a journey toward readiness,” says Google’s announcement. That partnership sees Google “partner with you on a step-by-step process through assessment, remediation, and onboarding, where we bring your architecture, control, observability and measurement into Google-standard Mission Critical Operations mode.”

many faced statue

The many-faced god of operational excellence, DevOps and now 'site reliability engineering'

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Google sticks around to “drive continuous improvement of your environment through our biannual tune-ups, architecture reviews, and other ongoing check-ins.”

“Our highest tier of engineers will have deep familiarity with your workloads, allowing us to monitor, prevent, and mitigate impacts quickly,” Google states, claiming it will offer “the fastest response in the industry.”

“For example, if you have any issues--24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week--we’ll spin up a live, war room with our experts within five minutes.”

None of this is free, of course. You’ll need to be a Premium Support customer, Google’s top tier of Cloud support. Premium Support already offers 15-minute response time for priority one cases. However, it appears that Google is trying to get you into a state in which you need less and less support, because you have adopted Google’s own reliability practices. ®

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