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The Trestle-board and the SLO
10/26/2025
The Trestle-board and the SLO
Join us as we uncover how the timeless lessons of structure, planning, and meticulous refinement, taught within the degrees of the Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason, are utilized by modern Site Reliability Engineers (SREs). These lessons are crucial for designing, deploying, and maintaining reliable computing systems. What You Will Learn: - The Blueprint for Reliability: Adherence to Design. Discover how SREs apply the principles of the Trestle-board (used by the Master-workman to draw his designs) to their infrastructure. We discuss the foundational importance of explicit planning, focusing on translating business goals into measurable Service Level Objectives (SLOs). The goal is to build a "spiritual building" (the reliable service) that achieves figure, strength, and beauty. - Refining the Rough Ashlar: Eliminating Toil. Learn how the SRE mandate to eliminate toil directly mirrors the builders' transition from the Rough Ashlar (representing a crude, imperfect state) to the Perfect Ashlar (a stone ready by the hands of the workmen). Toil is the manual, repetitive, automatable work that lacks enduring value and scales linearly with service growth. SREs dedicate their time to engineering work (at least 50% of their focus) to write software that replaces this manual labor, ensuring staff scales sublinearly with system size. - Searching for Truth: Mastery Through Failure. The diligent worker must search to the foundations of knowledge to find the Truth buried under error. We explore SRE's commitment to rigorous self-assessment, particularly through blameless postmortems following significant incidents. This practice is essential for finding the root causes of failures, improving systems, and making the organization more resilient as a whole. - The Discipline of the Craft: Understand the emphasis SRE places on high standards for workmanship and conduct. Just as the craft requires "virtuous education", SREs prioritize continuous learning and structured training, including studying the liberal ARTS AND SCIENCES, to master the complexity of distributed systems. We look at how practicing mental discipline, combined with preparation exercises like disaster role-playing, aids in maintaining rational, focused, and deliberate cognitive functions during emergencies. This episode demonstrates that whether erecting physical edifices or building the world's largest cloud services, success hinges on meticulous execution, relentless refinement, and an unwavering commitment to quality and Fidelity. Source #1: (1866) by Malcom C. Duncan Source #2: edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy
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