SRE Incident Preparedness and Drills: From Paper Plans to Muscle Memory
Overview It’s 2 AM. Your phone screams. The monitoring dashboard is a sea of red — core transaction P99 latency just hit 8 seconds, upstream services are timing out and circuit-breaking, and customer support chat is flooding with screenshots. You’re VPN-ing in while your brain runs at full speed: have we seen this scenario in a drill? Is it covered in the runbook? Do I remember the failover steps? If you’re still searching the wiki for documentation at this moment, it means one thing: your runbook was written but never practiced....