The why and what of our Software engineers on Duty

Let's be honest about this, nobody likes to be woken up at night to react to an alert whether it's a text- or whatsapp message, (automated) phone call or traditional pager. But every company taking his 24/7 run seriously has to organize their on call duty in a scalable and sustainable way. Initially bol.com organized it in a traditional way, meaning a team of system engineers with different specialism took care of the duty.

What this episode covers

Only a couple of years ago we realized we needed Software Engineers in this setup as well. In this episode we ask our guests everything about this journey so you can learn from this.

We explore aspects and explain why you sleep well at night

• Why did we start the Software Engineer on Duty (SoD) initiative?
• What does the current SoD look like?
• What is the relation between SRE and SoD at bol,com?
• What are the prerequisites for a team to hand over responsibilities to SoD?
• Experiences working as an Engineer on Duty.

Guests

• Ruud Straver - Site Reliability Engineering Manager
• Bart Enkelaar - Regular on the podcast, host of the Friendly Tech Chats

Notes