The coolest thing I took away from the SRE book was this progression of system operations from manual, to scriptable, to automated, to a fourth category I hadn't even known existed: autonomous. The idea that you can keep moving up this hierarchy of exception management beyond even chef and puppet, and systems will be able to heal themselves, is a pretty cool one.

As a manager, this made the concept of 20% time a lot more clear. These are people with the knowledge and incentive to build a hierarchy of systems that progressively remove risk from their work. This is in fact their primary business objective. And we need to make sure they have time to do that, vs working them to death with manual remediation. It's a great lesson.

Incidentally, Stackdriver contains a simple alerting and incident management tool that's really nice to use. Hopefully it gets more robust as time goes on and larger and more complex orgs move to their cloud. Edit: not Outalator.